Pattern Play: Layered Designs

1. Intro: Hey guys, I'm Dylan Mierzwinski, graphic designer, illustrator and sewing enthusiasts living in Phoenix, Arizona. In this Skillshare class, I'm going to show you how to tackle repeating patterns that have multiple layers of motifs. Will start off by getting organized with groups, arranging and layers, then we'll build and test our tile and play around with effects and color options. Let's get tiling. 2. Project: For your class project, I want you to make a multiple layer repeating pattern with the theme of your choosing. You may want to watch the course through first to get the ideas flowing. Be sure to upload your project for all of us to you and all over and feel free to use mine as a template. Resources for the course are attached to the project page on the right-hand side. 3. Breaking Down Patterns: First I want to get clear about what type of patterns we're going to be making in this course. Some patterns have a lot of intricacy to them like this Alice in Wonderland print by Anna Bond for Cotton and Steel, or this chipper print by Tula Pink for Free Spirit. Both patterns have a more complex layout of motifs that result in intricate and beautiful repeats. However, if we look closely we can see that these intricate motifs all lay on one layer. They don't overlap each other or create a foreground in a background, other than the background color that lays beneath the motifs themselves. What we're covering in this course, are patterns that have multiple layers to create a foreground and a background like this mermaid magic missed by Sara Jane for Michael Miller. Where the background is made up of the green painted areas and the foreground is made up of the mermaids, bubbles, stars, and sea life. Or this brocade peony by Kaffe Fassett for Free Spirit, where black and white illustrated flowers make up the background and painted but realistic peonys make up the foreground. The complex but unlayered patterns, while intricate in lovely just have one design that's repeating. With layered patterns, the motif composition can be simple or complex but in both, you have instances of two or more designs that are repeating simultaneously. So why venture into the land of layered patterns? For one thing, adding in layers of motifs adds depth to your pattern. Instead of flowers on flat color, textures in motifs can make you feel like you're in the garden or in a scene. Layered patterns also add interest. Even a simple dot or straight pattern behind a layer of motifs can change the personality of a print. They give you an opportunity to add to the story that you're telling and lastly, layered prints offer a chance for abstraction. Layering in textures or shapes can help change the whole personality of the motifs themselves. Now that we're on the same page with what layered patterns are, let's go back to this mermaid design and take a look at some of the ways we can start breaking these patterns down. The first thing to look at and understand are the grounds. Is there a foreground and a background? A middle ground? Multiple middle grounds? These grounds make up the actual layers that create the pattern. With this mermaid pattern, we can see that at the very bottom is a cream colored ground. On top of that are these green painted areas on which the other motif sit. I know that the green is one of the background layers because the other motifs are always on top of it. Next we have the mermaid sea creatures and sea shapes that make up the focal points of the pattern. It doesn't look like any of these motifs interact in a way that suggests they are on separate layers, so this must be the foreground design. Once the layers have been identified, we can look at which layers are dependent and independent. I do this by paying attention to consistencies and how the layers are interacting. For instance, there don't seem to be any rules about how the focal points, the mermaids, bubbles, stars and sea creatures interact with the green background. Sometimes the mermaids are on top of the green and sometimes they aren't touching it. Other times they're partly touching the green and partly touching the cream. In fact, I could probably move the background with the green motifs over two inches without disrupting the flow of the overall design, so to me these layers are fairly independent of each other. In this plaid geo print you can see that if I move to the foreground of golden lines, they would no longer line up nicely with the background of intersecting blue, teal and orange lines, so these layers are dependent on each other. Now, please keep in mind that if you're making a layered pattern, the patterns are always going to be at least a bit dependent on each other because you're trying to make a cohesive design, but assessing the degree of the dependability can help you with planning your own pattern. Let's take a look at a few more. I think it's helpful to reverse engineer work that you love to better understand it. By looking at the various grounds in a pattern and determining the dependence or independence between them, we're able to make educated guesses of how the pattern was constructed and apply that to our own pattern-making. I find a nice place to start is to first identify the color ground, because it's an easy win, followed by the focal point, since it's where your eye goes first. Starting with this floral pattern, I can see that the blue gray is the color ground, with the focal point being these black and white floral motifs. Since these motifs sit on top of everything else, I recognize it as the foreground. Behind that we have intermingling neutral and coral leaves and it's possible that these leaves are all on one layer, or on separate layers but in either case, it does appear that the neutral leaves are behind the coral ones. With the coral leaves having some type of transparency overlay to interact with the leaves beneath it, so I'll mark the neutral leaves as the background and the coral leaves as the mid ground. I'd read the layers as being fairly independent of each other, since I could move one of the grounds around without obviously disrupting the flow. Knowing all of that, if I were to build this pattern in my mind, I'd set up the foreground and focal point first to get a balance I like and then work on the back and mid ground motifs to fill in spaces and to build the sense of movement. In this Michael Miller print, the turquoise or teal is the color ground and these starburst and large dots are the focal points. What's interesting here is that although the dots and starburst work together to create a focal point, I'm able to tell there on different layers because that white crisscross texture goes on top of the dots, but not the starburst. Going from the back to the front, we have a teal ground, a red and white dot background, white crisscross lines for the mid ground, and the starburst as the foreground. The dots in starburst are dependent on each other since the center of each starburst coincides with a dot. I'd probably start by getting their placement down first, even though they're on separate layers. The white crisscross mid ground is independent of these, meaning I could move it around without disrupting the pattern. So I could work on layering this in separately. This Rae Ritchie print has a color ground of Navy with the beehives acting as the focal point. The flora and fauna are always behind the beehives, so I consider that to be the background. These layers seem fairly dependent on each other, since each beehive is accompanied by a larger fern that curves with the shape of the beehive. In my eyes, it would make sense to develop these layers simultaneously. With this Marie-Claire Bridges pattern although complex, there's really only a purple color ground, textured background and floral foreground. The background layer is dependent on the foreground layer since the background textures use the floral as borders for where the textures end. If I had nudged these textures over, their end seams would no longer be neatly covered by the floral. In this case, I would start with the floral focal point, which is independent in itself and then fill in the background textures once the foreground is all set. Lastly, we have this Patty Young print which has a green color ground, a background of light organic shapes, light green organic shapes, and a foreground and focal point of foxes and their little friends and surroundings. The placement of the background seems totally independent of the foreground. I'd start by getting the focal point in place, then work on the background layer. That's a lot of information which reminds me of my last point. Patterns are so pleasing to look at, that it's easy to forget all the hard work that goes into a great repeat. The process from a sketch, to motif, to pattern is long, so don't worry about really taking time to try different things until the pattern feels right. This doesn't mean be a perfectionist and never finish any work, but don't rush it either. Patterns are lovely, but they're puzzles to assemble. 4. The Big Secret: I want to let you in on the secret right away. And that's that making layered patterns is the same process as making any other pattern. You'll be constructing a tile that repeats seamlessly in all directions. But this course is here to show you how to be successful making a layered pattern by utilizing Illustrator's various tools to stay organized, which you'll learn about in the next video. From there, I'll do a refresher on how to tile and cover some tips for making your patterns better. But I really wanted you to know that the key to layered patterns all, maybe surprisingly, lies in the very next video. 5. Grouping, Arranging, and Layers: Let's start by taking a look at grouping. The concept of grouping is not difficult to grasp. I know that you're going to get it the first time I show you. However, being able to understand just how robust the grouping tool is within Illustrator and being able to use that in your work-flow is really going to be the key to keeping everything organized in Illustrator. It's simple, but it is very powerful. I have this flower, and in my eyes, this is one motif that I will want to use over and over, and I want it to be recognized as one item. But right now, if I click and drag, you can see that I actually have separate pieces. I have the petals which are separate from these black inner areas and even some of these innards are separate, they're just floating dots. I am going to group them by selecting everything and either hitting Command or Control G on my keyboard, or going up to object and group. When I click and drag these items around, sure enough, they are seen as one item. I can rotate them as one item. If I take a look at the fill over here, since the items within the group have different fills, it's giving me a question mark because it doesn't know what the fill is because there's multiple. But if I click on one of my color swatches, then I'm able to change everything in the group to one color. You're really able to look at this group of separate items as one cohesive unit. It works for aligning too. If I make a rectangle and change the color, and I want to align this flower as one piece to the center of this rectangle, what I can do is select the flower and shift click on the rectangle. I'm going to click the rectangle one more time to let Illustrator know that this is the key object that we're aligning the flower to. I'm going to go up to the align tools up here and select both of the center ones. Sure enough, that flower is centered in the rectangle as we want it. If I go ahead and make a duplicate of this, you can see that I'm also able to duplicate the groups as if it's one object too. But I'm going ahead and ungroup all of these and to ungroup, I'm going to go to Object Ungroup, or you can see the keyboard shortcut is Shift Command or Control G. I'll hit that and these are all separate pieces again. I'm going to move them so that they're not in line, they're not centered anymore with this rectangle. Now if I select everything and click on the rectangle again to let it know that that's what I want to center things to and use my align tools, the result that we get is very different from the flower when we centered it as a group. You can see that in this case, it looked at the group as one unit, it found where the center of that group was and aligned it with the center of this rectangle. Whereas over here, it took all of those separate pieces and found their center and aligned that with the rectangle. This layer with the dark stuff, it's aligned in the center and then these petals themselves are aligned in the center, which is obviously not what we wanted. What I wanted was to have that flower centered there. It's really cool and powerful to be able to have multiple paths be looked at as one shape. But what if I want to alter items within those groups or what if I want to do something that I don't want to apply to the whole group? For instance, if I wanted to rotate these petals a little bit or change the color, well, I don't have to ungroup that to alter these. Instead, what I'm going to do is go into isolation mode, which sounds like a very sad and depressing thing, but it is not in Illustrator. Isolation mode is really just a way to drill down into the groups that you have. Right now if I click once with my general selection tool, as we know, the whole group is selected. But if I double-click, then things are going to be a little bit different. For one thing, our background rectangle became a lot lighter in color. Not only that, but I can't even click and drag and move it around. So already, isolation mode is giving me access to only the items in the group without disrupting anything else that's on my art board. The second thing to notice is that Illustrator gave me some breadcrumbs up here so that I can find my way into the hierarchy of where I'm at. So right now by reading these breadcrumbs, I can see that I was on layer 1, and then I went into a group, which is where I am. Now it's almost as if these items weren't grouped at all because now I have access to them as if they're separate objects, but really, I'm just in isolation mode within that group. Now I could grab these petals, I can change their color, and I can hit Escape on my keyboard to exit out of isolation mode. You can see that it kept my changes, but I still have a group. My object is still grouped and I didn't accidentally move around my rectangle since I was in isolation mode, that was protected. I'm going to undo this to go back to the other color I had. You can imagine when we have multiple motifs going in different directions and overlapping, it can be difficult to click on just the thing that you need, but by being able to double-click and go into a group, now I have access to only the pieces that I want and I don't have to worry about accidentally grabbing this flower back here. All I have access to is what's inside of the group that I'm currently in. What's nice is you can group things multiple times. I'm going to move this back close to the center. Actually, I don't even think I need this rectangle anymore, so I'll get rid of it. I'm going to ungroup my flower that I have here. If I take a look at what I have, I really have a bunch of separate pieces. I have the two big pieces I have are these petals and these inner shapes. But then I also have all of these dots that are part of that makeup, the part of the motif with these inner shapes, but they're actually separate. What I want to do is I want to group all of these dark pieces together. Because if I ever want to change the color of these innards, I want to be able to quickly and easily grab just those and not have to then try and grab these ones that I couldn't get before. To me it makes sense to group those together. I'm going to drag a marquee around all of this. But if I hit Command G right now that I'm just going to group everything back together because you can see I have my petal selected too. I'm going to deselect my petals by holding down Shift and clicking on them. Now all I have selected are these black pieces and I'm going to hit Command G on my keyboard. Then since I still want to be able to move this flower around as one, I'm going to select this group of inner pieces that I just grouped together. I'm going to hold down Shift and click on the petals, and I'm going to hit Command G again. Now what I have are two layers of groups. If I double-click and go into isolation mode, it's just easier to see that you're in isolation mode when there's a color back here. I'm going ahead and double-click on this. My background rectangle and my grouping text up here has faded to visually indicate that I'm inside of isolation mode. If I look up to my breadcrumbs, I can see that I have layer 1 and then sure enough, I'm within this group. As expected, I can click on the petals and I can change those colors, or I can just grab the group of these guys and change all their colors on the fly. What if, instead of changing those colors, I really want to move this dot right here? This one is just not working for me. Well, if I click and drag, since it's a group inside of this group, it's going to move it all as one because it's a group like any other. What I can do is I can double-click again and go into a third level of isolation. Now even the petals aren't accessible because the only thing that was in the group that I just went into are these inner pieces and they're little dots. Now I can click and drag and move these around as I want, and then I can go back a level by clicking on this. So now I'm back into my first level of isolation. I can go ahead and change the petal colors, hit Escape on my keyboard and go back, and now I was able to make all of those changes without disrupting anything. Grouping paired with isolation mode really allows us to drill in and get down deep into what we're working on without disrupting things that are close by or part of a motif that we're working on. When we get into arranging, now we're starting to talk about which things are in the front, which things are behind other things, that's what arranging is. Just like grouping, it's not a very complex idea. For instance, when you look at these three circles, which one is in the front? Which one is in the back? Which one is in the middle? Well, it's easy for us to see that this red one is in front, this green one is in the back, and this pink is in the middle. If you ever want to change the arrangement of those, all you have to do is select what you want to move and right-click and go down to Arrange. We have our four options. You can bring it all the way to the front or send it all the way to the back. You can bring it one step forward or send it one step backwards. You can always right-click and find this Arrange menu here, but I can't recommend highly enough learning these keyboard shortcuts. They're easily one of the top 10 groups of them that I use in Illustrator. My fingers can use them faster than I can think of them, which is exactly what you're looking for. Anything that you can automate and make quicker in Illustrator just leaves that much more room and time for your own creative process. If I want to send this guy backwards, I am going to hit Command left bracket. That's going to step one step backwards. If I do it again, it'll step behind that green circle. If I want to bring it one step forward, I do Command right bracket. The left and right brackets are going to be your back and front, left is back and right is front. If you want to send something all the way to the back and you don't want to do one step at a time, you do Shift Command left bracket. Conversely, if you want to bring it all the way to the front and not step one at a time, you can do Shift Command right bracket. So not too tough. You can have things in front of other things, and things between other things, and that all has to do with the arranging, and this interacts with grouping in the way that anything else with grouping does. So I'm going to go ahead, and make a duplicate of this circle, bring it to the front. I hit Shift Command right bracket, and I'm going to center it within this pink circle, and I'm going to go ahead, and group those two together, so now this pink. Oops, and I did not do a very good job at grouping them. There we go. Now this pink circle with this red circle inside of it is one group, and you'll notice that as I start to move it, and arrange it. Just like we'd expect the group is moving as one. That is to say, I can either have this group of items in front of this green circle, or I can have it behind that. I can never have a group of items that has an external object in between them, so what I mean is this is a group. We have this circle in front of this circle in this group. I can never keep that group together, and have this green circle be in-between the pink, and the red. It can either be all the way in the front, or all the way in the back, and so this gives us another layer of being able to arrange things. It means that I can take my flowers, I can group those together. See I have a flower group here, and a flower group here, and I can arrange just those two objects without throwing off the flow of everything that is aligned with this flower. I don't have to worry about sending the petals to the back, but leaving the accents in the front. I can go ahead, and move those together as one. Now where layering comes into play, is it really just adds another layer. No pun intended to how we can group, and arrange, and move our items around. So right now I have these gold motifs that are arranged behind these flowers, and I know they're behind because if I move them around, the flower is always in front. The only groups I have are these flowers themselves. The flower motifs are grouped. You can see that even though I only have two flowers, and a few groups of these shapes were starting to get a lot going on. If I wanted to arrange, and send this gold guide in front of this flower. Of course I can do the send of front, but then if I decide that I want it to be in the back, I either have to hit Command left bracket enough times to get there, or I have to send it all the way to the back, and then send this rectangle all the way to the back, so that it's still behind everything, and it can just start to become really cumbersome to start arranging these items when you have a lot of them. So layers is just the next step in that organization. So I'm going to open up my layers panel, and if you don't have your layers panel, you can go up to window in layers, and you can see that I have two layers in here. I have one for these three circles I was working with, and another for everything else that's on my art board, and I'm just going to go ahead, and delete this other layer, because we don't need this. Now that we've talked about it, and I'm going to move over here, and for me it would make my life a lot easier when I'm arranging this. If I had this stuff's separated into separate layers. If I could have my flowers on a layer, and then these gold motifs on a layer behind that, and then the background layer. That way as I arrange these flowers on top of the gold. I'm just dealing with what's in that layer. I don't have to start dealing with all of this stuff. Let's see how we can make new layers and add artwork to those layers. So I'm going to go ahead, and hit the new layer button down here, and you can see that it gave me a layer that has the color of red, and the color really only comes into play with the outline of the objects here you have selected. So you can see that this layer is on the blue layer, so on I selected it's surrounded in blue. Similarly, once I put something on the red layer, it'll be red. So it's just a way to differentiate, and you can change that color by double-clicking on the layer, and they have some pre-concocted colors for you in here, or you can double-click on this, and pick your own color. So anyway, let's talk about getting work onto different layers, so I'm going to go ahead and select by Shift clicking my two groups of flowers. The nice thing is that Illustrator has this icon over here. This blue square, and it indicates all of the artwork that you currently have selected. All I have to do to move this to a new layer, is click on that square, and drag it up to this second layer. So now you can see my motifs are all outlined in red. Which is the color of this layer, and they now live there. Similarly, I can make another layer. This one is green, and I'm going to shift click to grab all of these gold motifs, and I'm going to go ahead, and bring those up to that layer. So already we've done ourselves a favor, because even if that's the extent of the organization we did, we keep flowers on a separate layer from the gold. We've really done ourselves a service, because look at some of the things that I can do with layers. For one thing, I can lock them. So now if I'm working on just the gold motifs behind the flowers, I don't have to worry about accidentally moving one of my flowers. There in place, they're safe, they're good to go. Similarly, I can lock my background layer, because I don't want to move that. So now I have access to all of this stuff. I can move them as I need to, and I don't have to worry about disrupting anything else, and just like before, I still have access to isolation mode. So I can move these groups around, but then if I need to go in, and alter one of these. It's the same as anything else with groups, I just double-click, I get in there, I move it around how I want. I back out, and then I move things around, and I still have things locked, and where I need them to be. The other nice thing is I can turn off the visibility of some layers, so when you're working with multi layer patterns. You're going to be getting one of the patterns in place, and then another one. So being able to switch, and see how they play together, and then being able to turn it off, and only focus on one of the layers. Is really going to make your life easier, and then lastly. If there's ever a time where, for instance, these gold motifs. They're all the same color right now, but let's say that one was green, and one was purple, and I decided at one point, you know, I want all of these guys to be the same color. Instead of having to go through, and grab all of these, and hope that I get everything. By having them on their own layer. I have this circle icon right here, which somebody once told me as called a meatball icon. I don't know if that was their own thing, or if that's like Illustrator terminology, but now I always think of it as the meat ball and you can click the meatball icon, and it will select everything that's on that layer. So in one-click, I have all of those motifs selected, and I could go ahead, and grab a color for my swatch panel, and now they're all set to be the same. What this also does for me is it gives me a lot of flexibility with making my patterns more complex, or more simple. So let's say that right now I have it set up so that my flowers are on the top. The gold is behind, and then we have this cream background. But let's say for some crazy reason, I decide that I want multiple layers of these motifs. So let's say I want to alternate gold motif flowers, more gold motif, and then have some flowers on the top. Well now all I need to do in order to do that is make new layers. If I wanted to do gold flower, gold flower. I could go ahead, and make a new layer. I can grab everything that's on this layer, and instead of just moving it. I can hold down Option, and I can click, and drag, and bring that to the top layer. So now I've made a copy of everything that was on that layer, and have duplicated it to a new place, and not only that, I've changed the arrangement of this, because now the flowers are no longer the top motif. I now have a layer of gold on top of that. So it just gives me some more levels in order to be able to organize things, and to play around, and so I could move this, and then I need to really lock that background layer so I could get these, how I want them, and then I could decide. Okay, I have these layers of intermingling motifs down here, and now I want to also have one more layer of flowers. So I could go ahead, and do a new layer. Grab everything, hold down Option, and bring it up here and now I have multiple inter-working layers. This could get really confusing if everything was all in one. But since it's all organized, I'm able to very easily turn things off, I'm able to lock layers so that I can only move things that are on the layer that I'm trying to manipulate, and overall just have a lot more control over what I'm doing. So that's grouping, arranging in layers. Again, they're very simple concepts, but when you start to combine them, especially when you have really complex or layered designs. You can really help yourself with your efficiency in your organization. 6. Making Motifs: I'm not going to talk too much about creating the actual motifs, but I will summarize what I did for this specific pattern. If you want to know more about how to make your motifs, you can check out my other skill share classes, which all deal with different ways to create digital art. For this pattern in particular, I had some flowers I drew in black in my sketchbook. I brought those into Photoshop to digitize and color a process that I show in my first Skillshare class, digitizing hand-drawn sketches with character. I could have just as easily redrawn them in Illustrator or live trace them, but I really just happened to start off in Photoshop. Then I exported my motifs as separate colors to bring into Illustrator, image trace is an always are most helpful friend. By separating the colors, I was able to live trace each part of the motif separately, then reassemble the pieces into the motifs I wanted. I grouped by flower and pebble shape motif so that I can easily grab what I need when I'm building my repeat. Go ahead and take the time to create the motifs you'll need for your pattern in the way that best suits you. 7. Getting the Idea Down: Before we get into all the work of making the repeat, which can be a long process of trial and error, we're going to have a little play time. We're going to start playing with our motifs to start resolving how many grounds we're going to have, how the layers are going to work together, and to determine whether our layers are dependent on each other or not. We don't have to worry about the tile size, we don't have to worry about the actual repeat itself, we're really just starting to play with these motifs to get the idea in motion. This is when you're going to figure out whether your design, your repeats going to be a set repeat. So maybe it's just going to have a few designs or motifs that tile evenly, or maybe it's going to be a half drop, or maybe it's going to be a tossed layout, which is what I'm going to do, where it just has a lot of organic movement. There's not a strict grid to it, so let's jump into it. Now, as I said, I'm not worried about my tile size right now. So this square that I have right here, it's really just there so that I have a place visually for me to build on. I like to have a background color in there so that I can really start seeing the difference in the hues and everything. So you can have color, if you find that you're distracted by color, like you're just focusing too much on what shade of pink, then you can even change all of your motifs to be different values of gray, white, and black, so that you're not focused on that, you're just looking at the motifs themselves. But I'm going to have this color way as I have it, and this is not going to be the final colors, probably not. It's just what I liked while I was digitizing everything. The first thing that you want to look at is do you have an idea already? Maybe you already know that you're going to have stripes behind your pattern, or you know that you're going to have a very strict pattern where the patterns and layers are very dependent on each other, and it needs to have just the perfect layout. Or maybe you just really don't know. You drew these motifs and you know that you want them to work together, but you're not sure how yet, and that's why this play is so helpful. Because before you start worrying about what size is my tile going to be? How am I even going to do this? What should I repeat first, we're just focusing on the idea. So I'm going to open my Layers panel and you can see that right now I have everything on one layer, and as I said, the first question we ask is, do you have an idea? In this case, I do have a slight idea. I know that these shapes right here, I drew with the intent of them just adding depth and interests to the background. I don't want them to be a motif that's very visible, other than just this other sense of detail that you get in the background. So I know that I want these to be on a separate layer that's going to be behind all of these guys. So I'm going to go ahead and make a new layer, and I'm going to drag those to that new layer. I know these are all going to be on top of that. I'm really not sure yet whether I'm going to want these to be behind the pattern, or if I'm going to want them to intermingle and sometimes be on top of the flower and sometimes not, so I'm going to move these flowers and this pebble motif to its own layer as well, on top of everything. So already we're doing pretty good and I'm going to lock the layer that this a little background swatches on. Otherwise it's going to drive me nuts when it highlights and moves around. So the next thing to ask is, do you know or what do you want the focal point to be in your pattern? For me, it's pretty easy. These flowers are the main motif through the focal point that I want to have guide your eye with these pebbles being the secondary. They're the supporting motif that add a little bit of abstraction, a little bit of interests. But they're definitely not the main thing that you're zoning in on when you look at the pattern. Then these guys back here, like I said, they're really tertiary. They, they're supportive but they're not as important. So that being said, it's pretty clear to me that I want to start with these flowers. These flowers are sort of the driver behind the pattern. So what I'm going to start doing is I'm going to make copies of these by holding down Option or Alt, and start dragging them over to my board, and I'm going to find ways that I like that these play together. I'm speaking from personal experience with this tip. Don't forget to have fun here. I sometimes I know that I get in my head about all I want this to be so good, I want it to be beautiful, I wanted it to be perfect, I want it to be a star in my portfolio, and that can really start to add undue pressure to yourself. I'm going to start bringing this motif into, and that's really going to handicap your whole process. You might not see patterns that are developing, or you might miss something because you were too scared to have fun with it. So really have fun. It's okay to try and retry things here. I actually am really liking what I'm getting here. What I'm learning just from seeing this is that I like that these curve with the shape that the external flowers make, and so I do know now that I don't want these pebbles to ever be in front of the flower. I think it really starts to model what's going on. So since I just learned that, I'm going to go ahead and make another layer in between my background layer that has these guys on it and the flower layer. I'm going to grab these, and I'll go ahead and drag them down to that layer. Now, no matter where I move them or copy and paste them, they're always going to be behind the flowers as I want them. Now, I can even start seeing how these are going to come into play and how I'm even going to space them, and if I need a bunch of them or maybe just a few, because that's the other thing. It can be a little hard as an artist. You took the time to draw this stuff and maybe you really had to pep yourself up and overcome all those silly things our brain tells us when we're trying to make art. So you don't want to get rid of anything. But the best way to become a better designer is to assess whether, what you're doing is necessary, what purpose it plays, and to not be afraid to throw things out, whether that's an idea or an actual motif here. So it doesn't look like there is too much rhyme or reason to how I'm placing these. I'm really just trying to fill in gaps and leave open spaces. So here's what I've learned just in these few minutes of play. For one thing, I came in knowing that it was going to be more of a tossed repeat. Meaning I'm not going to make one motif, and then take that and perfectly tile at multiple times. That's not the look I'm going for. I'm similarly not going to do a set repeat and a half drops. So I'm not going to do a design that's like that. There is a little too strict, I guess, of a layout and I want something more organic. So that's the first thing I know I'm going to be doing a toss layout. Second, I learned that these flowers are not only the focal point, but they are a little bit. These layers, the pebble and the flower are a little bit dependent on each other. At first I figured I could just put the flowers anywhere, but then I saw that these really work best, if they have some space. So it wouldn't make sense for me to build out only the flowers and then try and fit these guys in. It makes sense to start playing around with their placement as I build out where the other flowers are going to be. So that gives me a hint as to when I go to actually do the tile repeat that. I'm going to want to assemble those together. Whereas this guy in the background, his placement totally depends on where we're going to have open spaces leftover, and so I can worry about this guy last. I'll always keep it in my mind. When I'm placing these, I want to make sure that I leave some space, but I can work on those last. I was able to learn how many layers I have. My flowers make up my foreground, my pebbles makeup my mid ground, and these leafs or grass shapes make up the background, and so I'm feeling ready. I feel like I'm a little bit more knowledgeable, when I go into make my pattern, how I have to have things organized, and so I can tackle the repeat by itself. So go ahead and have some fun playing. In this video, I did one layout and it happened to work out really nicely. This does not happen all the time. I purposely for this class made motifs that I knew would be really easy to work together, because I didn't want to bite off this huge complex pattern and try and walk through it with you. So if you start playing around and it takes you five tries to get something you like, that's great, that's awesome that you took the time to do that. In fact, what I might do too is unlock my background layer here, and you can even grab everything, and make a duplicate of it and then try again on another one. So maybe over here we saw what it looks like when we have a toss layout with three different layers. But maybe I will play around with a set layout and a half drop, or maybe I'll play around with these shapes, this layer being on top, and what it looks like when that stuff is just flying through. So one thing to keep in mind is all these, even though I made a duplicate, I just duplicated each of the things on their own layer, and so you'll notice that if this pattern, I want these guys to be ahead of everything else, that's going to change it over here too. So you may need to make things break them into new layers. For this one, I might make a new layer and bring the background up to it and then make a layer on top of that, and bring the leaves to it, and then make a new layer on top of that, and bringing the pebbles and that a final new layer with the flowers on top of that. So I have everything in the same order, but now they're all on their own layers so that I can play around with them independently without affecting any of my other layouts. So again, this is for fun. Learn what you can about your pattern, and when you're already for your repeat, go ahead and check out the next video. 8. Tiling Pt I: Now, we get to get tiling, and like I said in my earlier video, the secret to making layered patterns does not lay in the pattern-making itself. That process is the same no matter what kind of pattern you're making, but what is different is all the organization. The great part is by the time you get to this point, you're already pretty organized. When you're getting the idea down, that's when you figured out approximately how many layers you're going to have and that can always change, but at least you have something down. At least you've got some type of organization that's going to help you manage all of the things that are going on. Depending on your pattern, you might find that it makes sense to take the layers one at a time. Maybe you'll start with your focal point and you'll build out that tile, and then once that's done, you'll bring in another layer. As long as you have things on layers, you can always lock a layer that you have that's done and work on another one. Or I'm going to show you how to develop it all at once, because that's kind of what my pattern calls for. These guys are a little dependent on each other and I want to make sure that I'm getting enough of these in the background and then I'm getting the overall effect that I want. I'm going to build this all at once. While I'm going through it, I really want you to try and pay attention to my process and I'm what I'm looking at because you're going to notice that I test the tile multiple times, and I'm going to talk through what I'm looking out for. Things to avoid that are easy to spot in amateur patterns so that you can start taking your patterns to the next level. The first thing I want to talk about really quickly is tile sizes. There are plenty of times when I don't know what my tile size is going to be until I start making it, and it's just something you start to fill out with how many variations and motif do you have, and is this interesting enough, and then you'll know that that's a good tile size. Especially with layered patterns, there might be times when you come into contact with layers having different tile sizes. For instance, if I wanted one of my background layers to be a striped pattern like this here, I made this tile that like a tile shade repeats perfectly, and it's not a big enough size for me to use as a tile for these flowers. You can see that one flower is already bigger than the stripe itself. If you run into this case, all you have to do is make sure that the tiles are multiples of each other. That's really all there is to it. This tile right here is 100 pixels by 100 pixels. I just want to make sure that when I make the rest of my tile, that it's a multiple of that, so right now I believe it's 500 by 500. These are going to work together just fine, because I'll be able to tile this five times in both directions and know that it will fit this repeat perfectly, and still seamlessly repeat on itself. Just keep that in mind. You can see that if I tile this five times this way, and tile it five times this way, and I think it's that perfect, there's a little space. You can see it takes up the same amount of room as my other tile and it's still going to tile nicely unless you are like me and you're sloppy when you click and drag, but it will, as long as it's a multiple you'll be fine, so keep that in mind. I'm going to stick with this 500 by 500 square and if I need to change it later, I can, but looking at the size of my focal point, I think that this is enough room for me to get a lot of variation out of these, but without it being too much. I'm going to open up my layers panel. I have eight layers here, even though I had four in the last video, and that's because I've already worked out what my pattern is going to be. I'm not a machine that can just talk through my process while doing it all the time. Before I was recording, I wanted to make sure that I had a tile that I liked and that I was going to talk about all the things that I want to bring up. That's why I have these extra four layers over here that are locked, in case I need to reference my tile or anything, but we'll come over here. Just as a refresher, I have one layer for my color ground. I have a background layer of all of these leaf shapes, I have a mid ground layer for these pebbles, and I have a foreground layer of my flowers. My flowers are my focal point, but I need to plan it with these pebbles because of how they form around each other. I just want to double-check to make sure I know the width and the height because we're going to be using these numbers a lot when we're making our pattern. Your tile doesn't have to be a square, it can be a rectangle, but whatever dimensions you start with, just make sure that they're even numbers and easy for you to remember. That is to say that makes sure that if you're in one of those situations that I mentioned earlier where your tiles are different sizes, make sure that you pick a whole number that is a multiple of whatever your other tile size is. But I'm going to stick with 500 by 500, that's easy for me to remember. I'm going to go ahead and lock this layer because I don't want to accidentally move it. It's one of my biggest pet peeves and illustrator when I accidentally move my background or something is highlighting and moving when I don't want it to, so I got that all locked. I'm going to go ahead and start bringing over my flowers. Now, if you liked what you started in the last video for the getting the idea down, then you can just bring that on over. For me, it won't be too hard for me to remember how I have this setup or to get something that I like. I'm just going to get started here. Now, already off the bat, one of the first things I can tell you is this is going to tile straight up and down and straight left and right like a grid. Which means that we really need to be careful to hide that grid. When you're placing your motifs, you want to try really hard to not line any up that are going to be lined up vertically or horizontally. Now, of course, there's going to be a limit to that because when you're building a repeat, if you ever have something that hangs off the edge, it needs to hang off the edge and another place too, on the other side. In this case, if I wanted to put this flower here, I would have to make a copy of it by hitting Command or Control C on my keyboard. You can go up to Edit, and Copy. Then I'm going to paste it by hitting Shift Command V, which is this paste in place. I just know that it's pasted right on top of that other flower. I'm going to go up to my Transform panel, and right here I have my X and Y values that are telling me exactly where the center of this flower is placed. I want to move it over 500 pixels exactly so that it's in the same spot on this side. The nice thing about Illustrator is; I don't have to do the math. Right now the X value is 11.581, and instead of adding 500 to that manually, I can just literally type in plus 500 and it's going to move that flower over 500 pixels. The reason I bring this up is because I was just talking about that grid, and you can see that since this flower needs to be in the same place on the other side, they're going to create a straight line. That's just how it is, and the same thing's going to happen when I have something on the top that's going to repeat on the bottom. But that just means that we need to be careful to mask that, to have other elements that flow nicely so that the line isn't so obvious. That's the first thing I want to point out. I'm going to start going in and I'm making copies of my motifs by holding down option or Alt on my keyboard and clicking and dragging. I'm going to start moving things into place. One of the things that you can do to make your motifs more interesting so that it doesn't look like I'm using this same motif over and over, is to use your reflect tools. I just right-clicked on that would transform and reflect. You can reflect things over the horizontal axis or the vertical axis, and it's just going to add more interests there. Always try to rotate things a little or reflect them anything that's going to mask their uniformity because again, we want this pattern to be fun and we want it to move, and it's going to be hard for that to happen if everything looks the same. Another thing in regards to creating straight lines is I want to be really careful with my motifs themselves. I was trying to rotate this to fit that flower, but it was mimicking the shape too much, and I want to stay away from setting this thing up so that it's too straight up and down. Even though there's a curve to it, this is still pretty up and down, and so when I put that into a repeat, it's going to stand out if everything else is rotated a little bit. You just want to be cautious with anything that you're placing to make sure that you're not ruining the illusion of the repeat. Already one of the things that's nice about having things on layers, maybe I'll put this here to throw off that line, did you see I was trying to rotate that and it was also trying to accidentally click on these other motifs? If you're having a hard time getting what you want, you can just enjoy the benefits of having things on layers and lock the layers that you're not trying to mess with. Now, I can rotate this or grab this flower without accidentally grabbing this pebble motif. I've got this guy hanging off the edge, so I'm going to go ahead and make a copy and paste it. This time I need to move it along the y-axis. Really quickly, when you're moving along the x-axis, whenever you need to move things to the right, you're going to add and whenever you need to move things to the left, you're going to subtract. When you're on the y-axis, whenever you are going to move down, you're going to add and whenever you are going to move up, you're going to subtract. For this one I'm going to go to the y value, I'm going to go to the end of it and I'm going to type in minus 500 and hit "Enter" and move that up. Now, another thing, not only with these horizontal and vertical motifs are the corners. I find that it's so tempting as a designer when you're making this pattern to put a flower right smack dab on the corner and then have it repeat in all four places. But I feel like it just draws the eye right to the corner, and so sometimes when I'm building out a corner shape or a corner motif, what I'll do is I'll have the motif like just barely kiss the corner. Like just the opposite of what you feel like you want to do. You really want to smack a flower right there, but instead, what if we just had this flower lightly touch this corner, and then we can bring something over here that also touches this edge, and so the viewer just doesn't even suspect that there's an edge there. This is touching this corner. I already have this one taken care of, but I need to also repeat it up here, so I'm going to grab both of them. I'm going to do Command C, Shift Command V. I need to move them up 500 pixels, so I'll go to my y values, hit minus 500, and now I've got that in place. I need to do this guy too; copy minus 500. I've got some stuff going on, I want to build this out a little better so that I can test it soon. I don't usually start right with the corners, I just really wanted to make sure I mention that to you. But I really want to start building out more movement so that I can see what this is looking like and what I need. What I'm looking at just so you know, when I'm trying to figure out what motif I want next. I'm looking at what flour I recently used and which way it's shaped like right now this is the same flower, it's just rotated and reflected differently. But I'm not sure that I want those to be so close together right there, so I might rotate it a different way so that you can't tell easily that they're the same flower. Maybe I'll just move this one up here. When you're making a pattern, you're paying attention to everything at once. You're always looking at what's happening in relation to the motif that I'm placing. What am I throwing off or what am I adding to by putting this here. Now, one thing I'm noticing is that I'm getting a little straight up and down with this composition, and I don't want that. I definitely want some movement. 9. Tiling Pt II: Let's do our first task. Let's say I'm ready to test it out and see if I've got this thing down. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to unlock my color ground and I'm going to hit "Command C" and shift "Command V" to paste it. It's going to be in the back still, because it's on my back layer. But, with it selected, I want to click on this square and move it to my top layer. I want to make sure everything is unlocked and I'm going to go ahead and select everything. I'm going to make a Clipping mask by either hitting "Command seven" on my keyboard. We're going to object clipping mask make. Now I can click on this tile, go to "Object", "Pattern", "Make", and I wanted to check this check box, this is Size Tile to Art. I can go ahead and zoom out and see what I'm getting. The nice thing about what I'm seeing so far, is that the motion is going this way. I've got diagonal motion. Which is nice because anytime you can have the direction of your print B not up and down, you're going to help mask that. It's looking okay so far. I'm going to hit "Cancel" on the pattern and I'm going to hit "Command Z" a few times. Because, when I made a Clipping mask of all of this, it moved everything onto one layer and I want everything broken back up. I'm just going to hit "Undo" until I get back to where I was. Now everything is back on its own layer and I can keep going. That's what I'm going to be doing whenever I'm testing a pattern. I'm going to copy the background tile and paste it in front, make a clipping mask, and then test it with the pattern tool to see how it's looking. Again, I'm looking for a movement. I'm looking to see if I'm getting any up and down motifs or anything that is standing out to me as kind of ruining the repeat. I'm going to keep going with this diagonal that I had formed because I like that motion. Then, when I fill in the other spots, I'll be able to mimic that. Don't forget after you test and have unlocked everything to lock anything, backup that you need. This is good. I don't want to forget about these guys. I want to start working some of these to see how that's going to look. Since everything is on layers, isn't it so nice that being organized? You can just drag stuff over and know that it's going to be in the place that you kind of thought it would be. I'm going to reflect this. Now that I'm working on this background layer, these guys are just going to start getting in the way. I'm going to lock the layers that have those on it, so that I can freely move these around and not get super annoyed. Again, that's really the key to this. Like, could you imagine if everything was on one layer and you're trying to arrange it and make sure that the things you want in front are always in front and so, it pays to be organized. I'm going to do another test. I'm going to give you a tip that I just recently learned, that has been so helpful with pattern-making. That's to do a Squint test. Another pattern teacher taught that to me. I really like it. It might be obvious, like right now I can see obviously I have a lot of space around this, that this pattern isn't filled out. But what I can start doing is, I can zoom out and I'm going to just physically squint with my eyes and I'm going to see what stands out most to me. What's standing out most when I squint is this one flower, that is making a square. That's the area that I'm going to look out for next. Other things your eye might be noticing are stripes. You might notice that you have a whole line of motifs that are in one straight line. Like I am getting a diagonal stripe here, because that's how I've set everything up. A diagonal stripe isn't so bad, because like I said, it doesn't follow that grid. But, if I started to get a bunch of flowers, that were straight up and down or even right here. Do you see these three flowers in a row, and then the fourth one from where it repeats? If I put a flower right here, I'm going to start creating a stripe. That's definitely one of the things that I'm looking out for when I'm testing. I also like to test because it helps me know where to go next. Like if I hadn't tested, then maybe this one flower wouldn't have stood out. Now that's going to be the place that I go to. Since I made a Clipping mask and everything is now on one layer, I'm going to hit "Command Z" to get back to where I was. I also want to move this over from my other motifs. I'll go ahead and lock my color ground again. This is the area that I was noticing. It's the area that I want to start building out. Since I noticed that I have a potential for creating a stripe here, I'm going to put a flower up here instead and see if that helps. I'm going to grab this one. I'll go ahead and reflect it. By the way, if you see that what I've done, if on the organization was all you needed to get going on your pattern, then by all means, don't wait for me. I just wanted to make sure that people who are not as comfortable with pattern-making had this video to watch. To see how I really go through and problem-solve in, I get this down. That's going to help a little bit. I need to keep building out these motifs. I don't want to forget about those, because I was starting to get a little bit of a stripe with them. Do one that's really on it's side. Again, I don't want to do that, because now I'm going to introduce this one really horizontal shape in there, which is going to call out the tile. We really need more of these background shapes. We're going to lock these layers and start bringing these in. It's kind of cool because when you look at a layered pattern, they can look so complex and there's a lot going on there. When you start to make one, you realize that it's really not all that difficult, like to step it up from one layer to a few layers, as long as you know how to group things and how to manage what you're working on. I'm going to do a test. I don't know, I might test a lot because it makes my pattern better, but also, I just feel like it's so endlessly satisfying to see something that you're making, repeat endlessly like it just is really fun, that's also why I do it. The first thing I'm noticing here there are these two right here, these two pebble shapes are creating almost a straight diagonal line here, and that's definitely not what I want, I'm going to go ahead and fix that right now. I can see that's right here, I'm going to go ahead and reflect that and that will help that out a lot. Now I want to be careful because I don't want to create the same thing right here, maybe I'll move this up here, it's crossing over the top, I want to also make a copy and put that at the bottom. I want to be careful because this flower right here, I don't want to set this one straight on top of it, I want to offset it enough, but I don't want to offset it so much that I have problems with another flowers, that's the obstacle with pattern-making is really masking that it's a grid that's repeating. The other thing you want to look out for are leaning motifs that might make your pattern field crooked. If all my flowers were facing to the right, if all of their black innards were going to the right hand side, it would start to make the pattern feel weighted on one side, that's something that you can probably notice from squinting, but I do want to bring that up because there have been times when I've made like a tile, like a really classic tile design and like a hand-drawn tile and I'm going to repeat it and I know it's straight, I know it's repeating perfectly left and right, but there's something that makes it look crooked and that usually means you have some motif in there, some combination of motifs that is making it seem that way. One of the things that could make me susceptible to that are these pebble shapes which totally leaned to one side or the other. I really want to make sure I have a mix of them going both ways, I can see it right here, I have two that are going different ways and that looks really nice, I just really want to make sure they're not all leaning to the right or all the flowers aren't all facing down or facing to the right, I really want it to be a nice toss. This is already looking a lot better, I have been neglecting that background, I want to get in on the background next. Then, see these holes are standing out to me when I squint and this little passage rate here connects those holes, I want to take care of that. A few other tools that are in here are "Show the Tile Edge" and Dim the Copies". If you noticed an area but you can't figure out where it is in your tile, you can turn those on, but it looks like from this highlighting that I need to take care of this area which combines with the top, I'm going to go ahead and back out and hit "Command Z" a few times and get back to work, time to test it again, I think I'm getting closer. The funny thing is as I showed you before, I already have my final tile, but what I'm getting here is different, like if we look at these two tiles, they are different and sometimes it's a good exercise to do something twice or multiple times to see if you get a result you like best. I still did not fill in those holes I was playing with the background, go back out and remember my mission, you need to fill up up here, and remember, I don't just want to plot things straight up and down, I want to figure out how I can play with the movement that's already happening. When I'm looking at right now is this line of connected flowers, I am trying to find a way to loosen them up, that's looking awesome. I'm going to change my copies here from three to three to nine by nine. I'm going to enter full screen mode by hitting "F", tapping it twice on my keyboard, I'm going to do the squint test with these small to see if there are any patterns that I'm getting. The nice thing is what I'm seeing is what my eyes are calling out are these spaces in between here, but none of them are straight up and down, they look like random spaces, which is what we want, I think the only thing that really stands out is this space right here. That looks like it's on the lower right-hand side of my tile, I'm going to go ahead and hit "Escape", that's going to take me out of the pattern mode, I'll hit "Escape" again to exit full screen mode, and I'm going to hit "Command Z" a few times to take me back to where I was, I think that area was right here that was standing out. I'm getting some weird lines here when I tried to add this flower. That's the other thing is you might find a hole that you need to fix, and realize that you might need to find a really creative way to fill it in without making a line or disrupting what you've already created. Yeah, I think that's looking really nice, I might play with it a little more, even though I have that other tile, I might try to work this one out, but that's how you make your repeat, that's the process that you're going to be going through. The things that you need to remember is anything that's on the left side needs to be on the right side, anything that's on the top needs to also be on the bottom and make sure that you're mindful of your corners. You're going to want to make sure that you don't have any straight up and down or left and right motifs where you can avoid it. Like we talked about, these flowers are going to be in a straight line because they're duplicates that cover the seam, but that means that I want to be really sure to not have any of these flowers line perfectly up with that. We want to watch out for striping, and striping doesn't only happen vertically and horizontally, it can also happen just right here I get this little line of flowers and they're far enough away from each other and have enough going on around the outside to distract, but if these were closer together, it might stand out to me as a stripe. We also want to watch out for leaning motifs that make the pattern feel crooked, anytime that you have a motif, you don't want them all to be leaning to one side. Similarly, when you have shapes like this, you want to be careful that they're not too horizontal or too vertical, you want to make sure that they have at least a little bit of angle to them. Test often, play around with your repeat, and remember when you're testing to do the squint test because it's remarkable how much your eyes can just take away all the specific stuff and look at the general placement of where everything is. 10. Finishing: Congratulations on finishing your repeating tile. That's the biggie. It's where I'm actually taking the motif and turning it into a repeat that looks really nice, and if we use a baking analogy, you've already found the recipe that you want, you gathered all the ingredients, you baked the cake, and now we get to the fun part of icing it. We're going to talk about finishing and we're going to go over some colors and effects and some things that you can play around with. Now for me, as I said earlier, I made this pattern with this color combination and I like it. But I always like to play around to see if there are other colors that I'll like more because this is so much fun to see your pattern once it's in place and see how different colors interact. The first thing I want to show you is how to manually recolor your tile in a way that's pretty simple, and I want to point out that I've made copies of my original tile and have locked and safely kept my original over here. This tile that's locked is still in It's clipping mask, all the layers are living on the layers that I want it to be on, and it's safe over here, because some of these are going to get a little unorganized. For instance, when we're manually coloring, I'm going to group all of this and It's going to take everything and put it on one layer so that's why we want to make sure we've got an original somewhere in case we need to go back. I'm going to hit "Command G" on this to turn it into a group, and I'm going to double-click to go into isolation mode, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to start recoloring one motif layer at a time. I'll start with the flowers and I'm going to use my direct selection tool to select one of the petal areas. The reason I use my direct selection tool is because all of these flowers are grouped with their flower counterparts and by using the direct selection tool, I can just select the one thing in then group. I'm going to go up to Select Same Fill color. This is the reason we put our tile into a group, is so that I can use that Select Same Fill color without selecting all of the yellow that's on the page. I really wanted to get into isolation mode, and then all you have to do is either double-click on your fill color and play around with the colors, or you can open up your Swatches palette, and you can do that by going up to window and swatches, and you can start clicking around and playing with some colors that you like. I'm going to do that for each motif. This time I'll grab the background, and we'll do this cream. I'll select one of the grass colors, Select Same Fill Color. Some of these, I can group, I can just group this layer of leaves together that way if I want to color it again, I can just select it and it will select everything. I cannot do that with the petal colors though, because they're already grouped with something else, and you can't have something be in two separate groups. So those ones each time I'll just have to do the Select Same Fill color. But that's not too bad. But with these ones, I've got them grouped so every time I try to change it, it'll work. These ones, I want to be just a bit darker than the background, and then I'll grab my last ones and Select Same Fill color and pick a color. That is how you can manually recolor your tile. If you're really great with palettes and you know really strongly what you want, then you can do that. However, if you're like me and you don't know what you want and you want to play around, then we can use the recolor artwork tool. Now, I did touch on this in my pattern play class on combining, Illustrator and Photoshop. I'm not going to dig too deep into it, but I'll say the same thing I said last time, and that's that Bonnie Christine has a really great class on coloring your artwork, including going over the recolor artwork tool, and she goes in a bit more depth. If you want to learn more about this after I'm done talking about it, go ahead and check out her class. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to select this other group, and I want to make sure that my artwork is fully visible. I don't have any of it hanging off. I want to put it to the side because the recolor artwork menu takes up some room, and once you're in the recolor artwork tool, you can't move around your document. I usually put it off to the left side like that and that gives me enough room. A quick rundown is basically it's showing me these are all the colors that are currently in my artwork right now. I have five colors that it's pulling from. These are the 'new colors' that I can change. This is what was in the art and this is what is currently displaying. Right now, it's showing us exactly what is over there, but if I click and drag and start moving these, then you can see that I'm able to rework what colors are where. Now, one thing that I want you to keep in mind is that if you want colors that you don't want to change, for instance, I know that I want these black flower parts to stay black, then you can take it out of the mix by clicking on this arrow, so only four of the colors are going to update, this one is going to stay black. But if you want to start shuffling around your colors, you can go ahead and use this button which says randomly change color Order, and it's going to do just that. It's going to start shuffling these around and giving us different results based on what those colors are, and so that's really cool. But what's even cooler is getting to play around with different palettes all together. I'm going to set this back. I have a bunch of palettes already worked in here, ones that I play around with a lot. What you can do is you can just click on one of them and start using the randomly change artwork color tool and start cycling through them. Now one thing that I want to point out is that now my pattern with all these new color palettes is looking pretty intense. There's a lot going on. The reason for that is because the way that I have this pattern set up and the reason it works right now is because these leaf shapes in the back, they're just like slightly darker than the background. They're not a completely different shade of color, and that's why it works. If you have something like that, that you want to stay intact, then what you can do is this little trick. If you have motifs that you want to be just slightly darker than the layer they're on top of, then you can grab all of them, I'm going to go ahead and just select everything on that layer, make sure that's all I have, and I'm going to set the color to black. I'm going to group them. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take that group and I'm going to turn the opacity down to maybe six percent. You can see that the result I get is very similar to what I had before. I have this one over here that is the color from before, and they look almost identical. Now, when I go into the recolor artwork tool, do you see how it's just ignoring that black? It doesn't even have anything over here. That's because Illustrator in the recolor artwork tool automatically are set to ignore black and white. You can change that if you press this color reduction options. If it isn't doing that, then you can check these preserved black and white. So basically now no matter how I go through my colors, it's always going to save that one as being translucent black. It's always going to be a little bit darker than my background color. So that's really awesome. It makes it so that it doesn't make my patterns so crazy. Like let me go back into how it was before so that you can see what the difference is. So now instead of being black and translucent, it's just blue. So the recolor artwork tool is going to count that as a color. When I go in and start shuffling these around, do you see how now the leaf color is purple and the black, the background color is black. So maybe that's an effect you're going for. This is abstracting the pattern. Make this would make a really pretty scarf. What I'm going for something a little bit more settled. So you can always grab the things that you want to be darker, group them together, change their color to black, and then bring the opacity down. You want to make sure you do it in that order because if you change the color. So I'm going to grab all of these and actually let me move them off the patterns so you can see exactly what's happening here. I'll make a copy and move these up. So right now this is how these are interacting. If I were to change these two black without grouping them and then brought the opacity down. You are going to see that any places where the shapes are overlapping, I'm getting another color introduced because these are all separate translucent things on top of each other. So that's how they're going to interact. If instead I group them first, so now I am going to group them, change their color to black and then bring the opacity down, you can see I don't get that overlap. It's just going to change all of them to the same value. So that's why I want to do it that way. The nice thing is, is it works with white too. So if you have the inverse of this and instead of wanting your shapes to always look a little bit darker than the background, you could select all of them, group them, change the color to white, and then bring the opacity down and you're going to get the opposite effect. Everything will always be a little bit lighter than the background, but it'll be the same thing when I go into the re-color artwork tool, it's going to go ahead and ignore that white for me. Now I can play around with color and the background will always be a little bit lighter. So that is definitely something that is good to know. It took me a little bit to figure out that trick and so I definitely want to pass that along to you. So that is the recolor artwork tool. Just for fun, let me grab these again Let's find another palette instead of me just clicking around, group them before bringing down the opacity. Now I'll pick a new color. So you can see what happens when you do. So you can play around with the palette. The way that I do it, because I find multiple color ways that I like. Like by the end of this, I'll have like 50 of them that I want all of them. So the way that I do it as I go through and I'll find something that I like like that and I'll hit "Okay". It says save changes to swatch group. I don't actually know that just updates the order of the swatches or what, but I always hit "No", because I don't actually want to change the swatch palette. I just want to change the artwork. Then when I'm ready to play around again, I just grab that hold down option, make a duplicate, and then I jump right back into the recolor artwork tool. So that's just a really nice way to find some colors you like and then keep going and experimenting and playing around. The last thing that I want to show you is blending modes. So if you're interested in a more abstract pattern, then blend modes are really going to help you achieve that. So I'm going to select all of this artwork to see what four layers it's on. I'm going to start reordering these. I'm going to put the leaves and the pebbles on top of the flowers. I'm not a crazy person. I know that this does not look good right here but what I can do is I can grab the meat ball for the leaves and I'm going to hold down "Shift" and click the meat ball for the pebbles as well. I'm going to click on my appearance menu, which is this. It looks like a little sun almost. Again, if you don't have that, you can go to window appearance. We're going to click on where it says "Opacity". This drop-down is our Blend Modes. What it does is it's going to change the way that the layers are interacting with the layers beneath it. So without introducing any new colors to the palette, I'm able to get this really interesting effect and I'm able to start abstracting my pattern. What's cool is that each blend mode works a little bit differently. So that one that I set them both to as overlay, but maybe I want to change the pebbles to exclusion, or maybe I want to try multiply. It's just really fun to see what kind of unexpected effects that you can get that you didn't know were there. So what's even cooler is you can combine all that I just showed you so we can set a blend mode and then we can go ahead and go into the recolor artwork tool. It just becomes a lot of fun because you don't really know how it's going to turn out. You don't know how these different colors are going to interact with each other but it's a really quick way to add some abstraction and add some interest to your pattern. So that's what I've got for you guys. That's the process that I use when I'm making complex patterns. It really makes it a lot easier. It makes it seem like it's really nothing different than your regular pattern making. It gives you some more advantages like these that you can play around and take your pattern to the next level. If you're interested in learning how to bring this tile into Photoshop and add additional texture, go ahead and check out my pattern play course on combining Illustrator and Photoshop, where I show you how to do just that. 11. Saving: Before we say goodbye, I didn't want to leave you without showing you how I wrap everything up when I'm done with the pattern and how I saved my files. I have a file open here called COSMO FLORAL TILES, in all caps, and this is just my naming convention. I know whenever I see the word tiles in all caps in one of my files or one of my folders, I know that that's the one that has the working tiles, finished tiles ready to go. I have a separate folder or a separate file where I've actually worked on everything and played around and I keep all of that and all of its layers. But once I get here, I bring all of the color ways into one place. I have them in their clipping mask, and here's what I do. I'm going to go back up to my pattern and my make, the same thing we're doing when we're testing and finalizing our tiles, and I'm just going to hit Done up here. You can also name your pattern. I'm really bad about not naming my patterns, and my colorways, and everything. But I could call this COSMOS TEAL or something. But I'm going to hit Done. That pattern was just moved into my swatch panel for this file, and I'm going to do that for all of these. When I'm done with that, I hit Save on the file and I make sure that it's in a folder that I'll be able to find it. Now you've got your working pattern tile and your swatches all saved in one place, nice and neat. 12. Thank You!: I want to thank you guys so much for taking my course and if you've taken my other Skillshare classes, I'm thankful for that too. Being a teacher on Skillshare has really changed the way that I'm able to work and I love connecting with all of you and being able to share what I've learned. Can't wait to see all of your artwork and patterns.