Quick & Easy Half-Drop Repeat Patterns Using Smart Actions in Adobe Illustrator

1. Quick & Easy Half-Drop Repeat Patterns Using Smart Actions in Adobe Illustrator: [MUSIC] Hello. My name is Carrie Cantwell and I'm a surface designer and educator. I have a BFA in graphic design and I've been using Adobe products for over 20 years. I became a surface designer in 2020. When I started creating patterns, I devised a system that helps me make the most of my time. I want to help you work smarter when creating patterns in Adobe Illustrator. By the end of this class, you'll be able to optimize your pattern creation workflow so you can focus on the fun part, creating the art. Tell me if this sounds familiar. You're scrolling through Instagram and catch on that the coastal grandmother trend is huge right now. You think to yourself, hey, self, I want to create a coastal grandmother pattern. You need to be able to work quickly enough so that by the time you've finished your pattern, the trend hasn't already gone stale. This is why efficiency is key. In this class, I'll show you my quadrant system, actions, and keyboard shortcuts, which will help you create half drop patterns quickly while ensuring they work seamlessly for a variety of mediums. This class is valuable for beginner to intermediate surface pattern designers who want to work more efficiently. For this class, you'll need a computer with a copy of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop installed. If you've never used Illustrator or Photoshop before, this class may not be for you because what I teach requires a basic understanding of those programs. Are you ready to jump in? Let's do this. 2. Project: Create a Half-Drop Pattern Block Using Adobe Illustrator: There are a lot of other wonderful surface pattern design classes out there, but my class is unique because I'm going to teach you the workflow I use that helps me save time when creating patterns in Adobe Illustrator. In basic repeat patterns, the design elements repeat horizontally and vertically. You may have created patterns like this. They're often square blocks that repeat right next to each other. But half-drop patterns are different. In half-drop patterns, the design elements are horizontally repeated and then dropped down halfway. The end result is a more sophisticated-looking pattern because it hides the seams a lot better. If you're just getting into pattern design, this project is a great place to start, especially if you've ever created patterns and looked at them and thought, these look a little blocky or choppy. If you really want to create sophisticated, elevated patterns, you will want to learn the half-drop method. I've made hundreds of patterns using the quadrant system I'm going to show you. I sell them on print-on-demand websites like Spoonflower. Once I started creating half-drop patterns, I saw my sales increase dramatically and I make a pretty decent living from royalties. I'm going to teach you how to create actions so you can save time by automating processes like repeating motifs. Now, once I've drawn the art, I can create half-drop patterns in minutes instead of hours because I use the streamlined workflow I'm going to teach you. In this class I'm creating half-drop patterns, but you can use the actions and keyboard shortcuts I'll show you with basic repeat patterns as well. To set yourself up for a successful project, make sure you have your computer ready with the latest versions of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator installed. You can download free trials for both using my links included in the PDF file called Links, which is located in the Projects and Resources tab below. You don't even have to create any new art for this project. I am giving you the design elements so you can focus on pattern structure and implementing my workflow. My Links file includes a link to get the free class design assets and color palette for this class. This is the artwork and colors we'll be using for this project. Please keep in mind, I own the copyright to these design elements, so you're not allowed to sell them. But you are more than welcome to use them for your project and share them in the project gallery as well as on your social media. You're also welcome to use your own art for this project. I just want you in the future to be able to quickly create beautiful, sophisticated half-drop pattern blocks that you can upload to print on-demand websites like Spoonflower and license with companies. My Links file also includes links to other Skillshare teachers who have taught me so much along my journey. I use a Mac, so the user interface you'll be seeing is the Mac. But Illustrator behaves similarly on both Macs and PCs. You should be able to follow along. Both Macs and PCs do use actions and keyboard shortcuts. The setup process may just be a little different. I've uploaded a sample project to the project gallery so you can follow along. Of course, this is one of a million ways to lay out these elements into a pattern. Feel free to make this pattern block your own. Change colors, rotate elements. Just have fun with it. You will also see in the Projects and Resources tab below a file regarding keyboard shortcuts. You can download that now or wait until later. I will be covering that in a few lessons. Are you ready to get started? I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Basic Repeat Patterns Versus Half Drop Patterns: [MUSIC] Let me tell you why I love half-drop patterns. Half-drop patterns hide the seams between each pattern block better than basic repeat patterns do. When you look at a half-drop pattern as a whole, it flows more smoothly because the motifs are more staggered. In basic repeat patterns, the motifs aren't as staggered. They repeat immediately right next to each other across a horizontal axis. Here are a few examples of my basic repeat patterns and here are some of my half-drop patterns. Can you see how the half-drop patterns just flow better? Half-drop patterns just look more professional when they're applied to products in the real world. The best part about half-drop patterns is they only look complicated. They're actually really easy to create. When I first started designing patterns a few years ago, I was only doing basic repeats. I didn't even know what half-drop meant, but I was always jealous looking at all these elaborate, beautiful patterns that other people were designing. I thought I'll never be able to create something that complex. But half-drop patterns aren't complicated if you can visualize how they're built. Whenever you create a pattern, your end result needs to be a seamless pattern block. You can tile it. That pattern block is what you upload to websites like Spoonflower to create seamless repeating patterns. When I first started designing patterns, I was making square pattern blocks to create basic repeat patterns. This example shows one of my old patterns, which is a square block that is 1,000 pixels wide by 1,000 pixels high. In this example, you're looking at four pattern blocks. Then I started learning half-drop patterns and I was copying my motifs then moving them over to the right, then dropping them down halfway. Then I would do the same thing, but I would drag the motifs up halfway. Then one day I noticed that what's inside this black rectangle you're seeing is my seamless half-drop pattern block that I can tile. This example shows one of my half-drop pattern structures and this shows four of my rectangle blocks. Now, I create my half-drop pattern blocks as rectangles. If you start thinking about your half-drop pattern blocks as rectangles instead of squares, you can start understanding how they work. It's that simple. I want you to learn how to work smarter so you don't need to overcomplicate half-drop patterns. Just design them with rectangles and your half-drop patterns will be so much easier to create. 4. The Quadrant System: How Motifs Repeat in Half Drop Patterns Versus Basic Repeat Patterns: [MUSIC]. In basic repeat patterns, everything that touches the left side needs to be mirrored on the right side, and everything that touches the top needs to be repeated or mirrored on the bottom. This square box you see is the Illustrator art board, which is the edges of my pattern block. This example shows one of my basic repeat square pattern blocks. When I tile all the pattern block, those partial flowers you saw on the left and right, top and bottom of the art board will line up to form a whole flower. The edges just line up perfectly. But half-drop patterns are slightly different. In half-drop patterns, the elements not only need to be repeated on the left and right, top and bottom, just like a basic repeat, but they also need to be repeated in a quadrant system. Everything on the top-left needs to repeat on the bottom-right, and everything on the bottom-left needs to repeat on the top-right. If you visualize a plus sign and four quadrants, then you can see where the elements need to repeat and you've got it. Even when elements are in the center of your art board, they still need to be repeated to the bottom-right, the top-right, the bottom-left, and the top-left. Every time you have a motif that needs to repeat, it repeats everywhere it would touch the art board. You'll also notice that when I repeated this center rabbit, it coincidentally was repeated on the top and bottom, left and right. This may seem complicated, but remember, instead of a square you have with a basic repeat, you're working in a rectangle with a plus sign and four quadrants. This is where visualizing that plus sign, that quadrant is going to really come in handy. If you look at this center rabbit, look at where the lines run through the rabbit dividing it. You can see when you start looking at the edges of the art board that this bottom left here, this corner, mirrors what's up here. This line is echoing this line. If you look at the bottom of right section of this rabbit, you can see that that mirrors this top-left. Again, this horizontal line is echoing this middle horizontal line, which is what divides your quadrant. The same thing here, the top-right of this rabbit mirrors the bottom-left portion of this rabbit, and the same thing, top-left here mirrors down here on the bottom-right. If you start looking at the horizontal and vertical lines of your plus sign, which is what creates the quadrant within your rectangle art board, you can start seeing where these lines are and where they intersect with each element so you know where they need to be repeated. Once we start creating our half-drop pattern block, you'll see it in action and it will start to click. This may all seem a bit overwhelming, but you can and will get the hang of it, I promise. If I can learn this, anyone can. I'm also going to teach you how to automate this entire repeating process. So you won't even need to think about any of this. You'll just hit a few keys on your keyboard and everything will fall perfectly into place. I'll even show you how to group elements so you can easily move them around when it's time to fine-tune your pattern. [MUSIC] 5. Set Up the File: Size, Colors & Layers: [MUSIC] Let's get started. If you haven't already, go ahead and open Adobe Illustrator, and we are going to create a new file. I'm just going go to File, New, and I am going to, first of all, change the measurements to pixels instead of inches, and I am going to do 2,000 pixels wide by 1,000 pixels high for my document size. I choose pixels instead of inches because when Illustrator renders vector graphics, it often guesses to the nearest pixel, and when you have your file setup using inches, and that has caused me some headaches in the past. I just speak the language that Illustrator natively uses, which is pixels, and that helps me avoid a lot of problems. I also design my files using RGB, that is because I often export them and upload my files to websites like Spoonflower. Spoonflower prints using red, green, blue RGB, they print digitally. But really this depends on your final application as to whether or not you want to use RGB or CMYK. Also, I always create my files at 300 PPI, Pixels Per Inch, which is the same essentially as DPI, or Dots Per Inch. That way, I ensure that I have the absolute highest quality file that I can possibly use. Go ahead and click on "Create". Let's go ahead and save this file before we do anything else. I'm just going to go up to File, and Save. I'm going to save it to my computer. I have Creative Cloud, so often I have this dialog box pop up. But I will just save it to my computer, and I'm going to call it Skillshare_Halfdrop_Block. I will just save it to my desktop and click "Okay". Really quickly, let me go over something with you guys. I'm zooming out right now, but if you see, this rectangle here is my art board. If you go over to your toolbar, if you go about 90 percent of the way down there is this little icon right here, which is your Artboard tool. Go ahead and double-click on that, and it's going to pull up your Artboard dialog box. It's giving you some information. This is the width and height that we set when we created our file. It's also giving us the X and Y coordinates of where this art board is located in this file. One other thing that Illustrator tends to do is guess to the nearest pixel where the art board is located with the X and Y coordinates. I have also run into some problems in the past with that when I export pattern files, so just to be on the safe side, I always set my art board, X and Y coordinates at zero pixels. That way, there are some hairline issues you can get with not only specifying things like inches, but also art board locations, so I just tried to cover all my bases here. That way, I always make sure my files are perfect, and I don't have to worry about any future headaches. Go ahead and click on "Okay", and I'm going to zoom out a little further, and we can see that our art board has jumped. I'm just going to click on my Selection tool to deselect that. Let's go ahead and name our layers, that's one of the first steps I like to do. I'm going to have a background color, so I'm going to go ahead and double-click on this word, "Layer 1" here, and I'm going to create my background layer. Let me go ahead and click on the "Plus" sign, and I'm going to double-click on this word, the word's "Layer 2", and I'm going to name this next layer graphics. This is where I tend to put all of my main graphics for my patterns. Then you may not want to do this in the future, but for me, I like to do this and you will probably want to go ahead and do this for the sake of this project. Go ahead and click on "Create Layer" one more time. Double-click on the words "Layer 3", and let's call this top layer here accents. When I create patterns, I have a background color, which is this layer, I have a main layer, which is where I put all of my main graphics, and then sometimes I like to fill in blank spaces with little details like accents, like dots, and things like that. I like to keep everything separated and named. It helps me when I want to move things around, hide them and show them, see what I think about the pattern visually, and it just makes things a lot easier when you keep everything separated. If you haven't already, download the Links file from the Projects and Resources tab below. On the first page, you'll see a link to get the free design assets and color palette for this class. You are welcome to use your own art and color palette for this class, but if you want to save time, I'm giving you the free design assets you'll need so you can focus on learning this workflow. I have my Design Assets file open, and go ahead and rubber band around the color boxes that are here. I'm just going to hit "Command C" and copy them, and then hop on back to the file that we were just creating, and you can just drop those in by pasting them. I'm going to go ahead and move them out here. Let's go ahead and set up our colors for this project. One thing that I like to do is, if I'm not using all of these colors that are default populated by Illustrator, and I have a color palette, I like to just delete them. I'm just going to go through really quickly and delete all of the color swatches that I am not going to be using for this project. Now, I've got just the colors that I want to use. Let's go ahead and set up our background color. First of all, let's click on this dark blue color that I gave you as part of your color palette, that has set our fill color here to this dark blue. Now, let's create a rectangle. If you go over to your toolbar, you'll see your Rectangle Tool. Instead of just drawing a box, which I don't want to do, I want to create an exact size box that fits this art board. I'm just going to select the "Rectangle Tool" while I'm on the background layer here, and tap. Now, I can set the actual exact size in pixels of our background color, which is going to be the exact same size as our art board. Click "Okay". Now, I'm going to go to the Selection tool, and I want to make sure this is aligned perfectly to the center of my art board, so I make sure that my align to art board here is selected, and then I just click on "Horizontal Align Center" and "Vertical Align Center", and it is now my background color on my background layer perfectly aligned to the center of the art board at the size of the art board. We can move on to the next step. [MUSIC] 6. Set Up the Quadrant & Drop in Design Assets: [MUSIC] Let's go ahead and create our quadrant. Right now we have our background layer and if you look in the center of this rectangle, you'll see there's a little dot there that is showing us the exact center of this rectangle, which also happens to be the exact center of our artboards. Go ahead and click on Command R, which is for rulers. Now we can see our rulers here. These guides that we're about to create, are really just guides for us. They don't have to be perfectly exact. I do like to try to make sure they're perfectly exact, but this is just a guide for us to keep an eye on where our quadrants are. Actually, if you select your box, now you can see that center point. Go ahead and hold down your mouse and drag down a ruler guide. If you drag it down to the center, it'll stop and snap to the center here. You can see it's showing us that this is the center of our background, our box, and it is exactly 1,000 pixels x-axis and 500 pixels y, perfect. Let go. Now, we're going to do the same thing on the left-hand side. Go ahead and hold down your mouse, drag your ruler guide all the way over to the center of this box until it snaps to the center like that, and you can let go. Now, we have our quadrant system. This is so helpful for me when I'm creating half-drop patterns. You may remember from a previous video, everything that is in the top-left needs to be mirrored or repeated in the bottom right, and everything in the bottom left needs to be mirrored or repeated in the top right. Now that we've created this, I'm going to go ahead and delete our color palette. Here's something that I do with every pattern that is really important. I suggest you do the same. I am going to click on my rectangle, my background color, and now that we have our guides set, I'm going to make this box larger than the artboard so it's hanging over the edges of the artboard. Just for the sake of being organized, I'm going to align it to the center. Let me tell you why I do this. I have had issues where if your background color or your art does not hang over the edge of your artboard here, I have had patterns that have one hair lines, in the seams between where the pattern blocks meet each other. That is because Illustrator renders vector graphics as rasters when you export them as something like a PNG file or a JPEG, which is what you need to upload to websites like Spoonflower. If you don't hang your art or your background color over the edge like this, you can end up with hair lines that are so small, you really can't see them unless you zoom in really close, but when you're printing something, that can cause major issues. I have had to go back and redo a lot of patterns in my past because of those hairlines. Just remember with your art and your background color, I never suggest creating a clipping mask or clipping or stopping any of your art at this artboard edge because you will end up with hair lines. It's just bound to happen. Let's go ahead and hop on back over to the design assets file. Let's drop in our elements. You can lock the layer that has the information on it that was just your color palette and the text. Let's lock the accents layer and now we just have our elements layer selected. You can either rubber band around everything or I'm going to hit Command-A to select all. I have copied it and now I'm going to lock the background layer on our file. Now that I'm back on our file, I'm selecting the graphics layer and I'm just going to drop our elements right in. Now let's go ahead and grab those accents from the design assets file. I'm locking the elements file layer here and unlocking accents. Those are these little dots here. These are going to be our little fill-in accents. I'm just going to copy them, go back to our other file, and I am going to paste them. Yeah, that's it. We have all of our elements dropped in, we have our quadrant set up here with our plus sign, and now our background color is hanging over our art board, so so we will not have any hairline issues. Let's move on to the next step. [MUSIC] 7. Set Up Actions & Keyboard Shortcuts: Part 1: [MUSIC] All right. Let's go ahead and set up our first three actions and keyboard shortcuts. I'm going to go ahead and lock all of my layers, and I'm going to hide the accents and the graphics layers and I'm going to actually for now hide my quadrant. Let's click on the plus sign. I'm just going to be creating a new layer here. You can do this with your own art. You can do this with anything. I am just going to draw a shape. It doesn't matter what it is. The reason I'm doing this is because I want to be able to see what I'm doing when we are creating these actions so I can make sure that it's working properly. Now let's go ahead and go to the Illustrator menu. Go to window at the top, and drop down and go to Actions. Now we're going to be creating our actions and our keyboard shortcuts for this class. What we want to do first is I'm going to create a set for these actions. Go ahead and click on the folder icon here, and let's just call it half-drop set. Now because we're going to have six of these, we can just put them all together in one folder. Now we have our folder setup. Let's go ahead and create our first action. I'm just going to click on this square. It can be any shape, doesn't really matter what it is. I just want to have something that I can click on so I can see what I'm doing. In the Actions panel, you're going to click on this plus sign here to create a new action. I want to name this action what I am going to be doing. I don't want to just call it action 1 because I need to remember what this action is doing. I'm going to type in here x equals plus 2000 pixels, which means I'm going to be moving at 2000 pixels to the right along the x-axis. Now where the function key drop-down is, I'm going to select F1, and I'm going to click on this box that says command. The reason that I do this is, right now what we're doing is creating a keyboard shortcut. Which means when we hold down the command key on our keyboard and click on the F1 key at the same time, then that will perform the action that we're about to record. The reason that I click on this command box here is because sometimes when I'm working, I accidentally will tap on the keyboard, and I don't want to accidentally tap on the F1 key and move something or duplicate something. The chances of me holding down the command key and clicking on the F1 key accidentally at the same time are much lower than me just accidentally tapping the F12 key. Go ahead and click on "Record" and what we're going to do now is illustrator is going to record everything we're doing until we hit "Stop" so it can be replayed later. Click on "Record." Now you'll see it's recording because there's this little red dot here. Go ahead with the object, whatever it is selected, go up to your Illustrator menu, click on "Object," "Transform" and "Move". Now what we want to do is in the horizontal axis, we want to add 2000 pixel, so I'm going to type in plus 2000 pixels here. In the vertical axis, we wanted to type zero pixels. I'm just going to type the number 0. Now you can see that along the horizontal axis, the shape is going to be moving 2000 pixels to the right, and it is not going to move along the vertical axis. That's how you do that and I have it set to preview so we can see it as it's happening. Also, you want to make sure you click on "Copy" here because we are duplicating this. We're not just moving the original element, we want to make sure we have a duplicate. Click on "Copy" and now you can see that your square or whatever object you're using to do this has been duplicated 2000 pixels to the right. You can click now on this square stop button, which is at the bottom of your actions panel because we're done recording. That is our first action. We have now created our first action. Let's move on to create action number 2. I'm going to go ahead and delete that additional shape. With our shapes selected, you want to go ahead and click on the plus sign. I'm going to name this what it is, which is y equals plus 1000 pixels and I'm going to choose the command F2, keyboard shortcut for this. Now I'm going to click on "Record" and I'm going to go to object transform and move. Now, it is keeping it along the horizontal axis where it is so it's going to be zero pixels. But what we want to do is make sure that it moves down 1000 pixels along the vertical axis. If we click back onto the horizontal axis here, we're seeing it's still at zero pixels. Now, right now if we don't click on "Copy" it is not going to be duplicating it, as you can see, it's moving it. Click on "Copy" and now it has moved 1000 pixels down the y-axis, which is the vertical axis so you can click on the Stop button. Now we have created our second action. Let's go ahead and delete this square. Let's go ahead and create our third action. With our square selected, I'm going to click on the plus sign at the bottom of the actions panel, and I'm going to name this what it is, which is x equals plus 1,000 pixels and y equals plus 500 pixels. I am going to choose the command F3 function for this, my keyboard shortcut, and I'm going to click on "Record". Now we're going to go to object transform and move. In the horizontal box, we are going to click Plus 1,000 pixels. We're going to move it along the horizontal axis, 1,000 pixels and along the vertical axis we're going to move it plus 500 pixels. Again, we are going to click "Copy" and now it has been, as you can see, duplicated from the top left to the bottom right. I'm going to click on stop here. Let me show you something really quick. When I was creating the action for this, it actually recorded me showing the guides, and I'm going to keep this in the video so you can fix this in the future if you want. You can actually tweak and fine tune your actions. Do you see how in our actions here we have our first action, our second action in our third action. In the third action, we just did one thing, we moved it and it tells you right here the details of what we were doing. It also shows that we show the guides. If you're like, Oh wait a minute, I don't want to always show the guides there, all you have to do is click on this one little row here and click on the trash can and you can delete that. You can actually tweak your actions. If you ever accidentally do something while you're recording, you can take each step out manually with that little trash can. Before we move on, I want to make one point here. A lot of the times when you're creating patterns and you have a shape and you want to duplicate it, or you want to repeat it somewhere, you will, if you're not creating actions and you just want to do it once, you'll probably be used to using this transform tool. This may seem familiar where you can see in this transform tool you have the coordinates of where the shape is via your x and y axis. You may be used to going to the end of your x coordinates and typing in something like plus 1,000 pixels, and then going to your y coordinates and typing in something like plus 500 pixels. Then if you click on "Return", you have moved it. Now that is an absolutely valid way to move something, but when you're creating actions, you do not want to use this transform tool. It does not behave correctly with actions when you're duplicating elements. This here, this transform tool is your relative position on your art board of an object. The object Transform Move tool is actually a command that tells your Illustrator file to the absolute position, not the relative position. If you want to move your objects in the absolute position, not the relative position, you want to use object transform and move and not just transform, because this is just moving your object in the relative position. It's not really that important that you know the difference, but just remember that anytime you create actions, don't use the transform tool. Go to Object, Transform and Move. That way you will always make sure you do not have run into any problems with your actions. That is it for our lesson, we have created our first three actions and keyboard shortcuts. Let's go ahead and create the final three and I will see you in the next lesson. [MUSIC] 8. Set Up Actions & Keyboard Shortcuts: Part 2: [MUSIC] Let's go ahead and create our final three actions. I'm going to delete this duplicated shape here and I'm going to hide my guides. If you look at the cheat sheet I gave you, the fourth action we're going to create is the command F for keyboard shortcut. With our objects selected, go to the plus sign at the bottom of your actions menu, and I am going to name this one x equals plus 1,000 pixels and y equals negative 500 pixels. That is the fourth one down in the cheat sheet I gave you. For this, we're going to use command F4. Go ahead and click on ''Record''. Now, we're going to do the same thing, object, transform and move. Now we are going to move it along the horizontal axis, which is the x-axis, plus 1,000 pixels, and along the vertical axis, minus 500 pixels. Now we're going to click on ''Copy'' and now you can see it has moved into the position that it needs to be. Before I do anything else, I'm going to click on that ''Stop'' button, and that is our fourth action. Let me go ahead and delete this square here. Let's move on. Let's create our fifth actions. With the objects selected, I'm going to click the ''Plus'' sign here, and this is going to be our fifth action. This one is going to be x equals minus 1,000 pixels and y equals minus 500 pixels. This one is going to be command F5. This one is the fifth one down in our cheat sheet, the fifth one down in that row, negative 1,000 pixels along the x-axis, horizontal axis, and negative 500 pixels along the vertical axis, which is the y-axis. Click on ''Record''. Same thing, object, transform, and move. Now what we're going to do is, we're going to do x equals negative 1,000 pixels, and that is moving it 1,000 pixels to the left along the x-axis, and then negative 500 pixels along the vertical axis here and we're going to click on ''Copy''. Now, as you can see, it has moved negative 1,000 pixels to our left and negative 500 pixels up on the y-axis. Let's go ahead. Let's move on. Let's create our final action. I hit ''Clear'' there. You know what? Let's hit ''Stop''. Sometimes I do that. I'm just going to go to the trash can here and delete that. Now I have my action nice and clean. Let's do our final action. With our objects selected, click on the ''Plus'' sign. We're going to call this one x equals negative 1,000 pixels and y equals plus 500 pixels. For our final one, we're going to do command F6. Click on ''Record''. Now, we're going to go to object, transform and move and we are going to have the x axis be negative 1,000 pixels, that's already populated from our last action, but on the vertical axis, we want to move it down 500 pixels, so I'll just change that to a plus sign. I'm going to click out of it and make sure it worked. It did. Make sure to click on ''Copy'', and that is it. I'm going to click the ''Stop'' button here. In the next lesson, we are going to be testing these actions to make sure they work. I will see you in the next lesson. I've just showed you how to create actions to automate your workflow for half-drop patterns. But remember, you can also create actions for repeating motifs in basic repeat patterns as well. Feel free to come back and re-watch this class at anytime if you need a refresher on creating actions. [MUSIC] 9. Test the Actions: One thing you will see me do a lot in this class is show and hide my quadrant, which is setup using guides. There are two ways you can do that. You can go to View Guides and Show Guides but I like to use the keyboard shortcut, which is holding down the command key, and also at the same time clicking on the colon or semicolon key on my keyboard. That is a really quick way to show and hide the quadrant. In this lesson, we're going to be testing these actions. Now remember, I created these actions using a square, but you can use any shape. It doesn't matter where the square is when you're testing them, what matters is that you do go through and test them. We're going to test these actions to make sure they work. First of all, let me show you something really important. I'm on a Mac, I'm on a laptop, and I use an external keyboard. You need to turn on your F keys. Right now my F keys are set up so that for instance, F11 and F12 are my volume up and volume down buttons. I don't want to use those volume buttons right now, I want to use those F keys, which are the alternate commands under those keys. I originally had a different segment for this, but there has been an update and I want to make sure you guys have the latest information. MacOS Ventura just came out. If you're using Ventura, which you probably are, it is December of 2022, my computer automatically updated me to the latest operating system. Originally with a Mac in order to turn on those F keys to make your pattern and use those keyboard shortcuts, you would have needed to go to your Apple menu up here and then go to system preferences. But because I am using Ventura now, you'll notice if I go to my Apple menu, there is no more system preferences. But never fear, let me show you guys, it's super easy, but it's a little hard to find but once you find it you won't forget. But it is a little buried where you turn on your F keys now. If you want to turn on those F keys and use those keyboard shortcuts, what you want to do is go to your Apple menu at the top left of your computer and go to what's now called system settings, that's like your system preferences. When you go to your system settings, you'll see a very different interface but if you go on the left-hand side, if you scroll to the bottom, you'll see a few things. You'll see keyboard, mouse, trackpad and printers and scanners, these are your input devices. The keyboard right here, near the bottom on the left, and I just scroll down there to get there, is what you want to click on now. If you click on keyboard, then it will open another little menu here with even more options. But you'll still see in here that there is not a little toggle for turning those F keys off and on. So what you then need to do is click on this button here in the middle on the right called Keyboard Shortcuts. If you click on that, there's more, then you'll notice that it's still not showing up. The first time I did this, I got a little confused. So you then also after that, have to go to your left again. You'll see a little menu or a little list on your left, right near the bottom, you'll see this thing called Function Keys, it has an FN, click on that. Now that's where your F1 keys are located, your ability to turn them off and on, this is the button that we were using in old versions of the MacOS up until now. This button was just under Keyboard. In order to start building your pattern and actually using these F keys and testing them out, you want to go into this menu here and turn this toggle on. What that does is it tells your computer use those F keys as standard function keys instead of what they are by default, which is things like your volume, you have some play and record and pause, or play and rewind and pause buttons if you're playing music. In order to use the command F6 for instance, if you do that, if you're building a pattern and nothing happens when you hit Command F6, that's because you need to turn this on. Now when you're done building your pattern, if you want to use those buttons again, those keys on your keyboard for things like volume, which I do. Also, I think F7 is my rewind button. But if you want to use those later, when you're not building your pattern, you're going to want to go in and turn this backoff. Again, let me show you guys real quick one more time. If you're on your computer and you want to build your pattern and you want to use those keyboard shortcuts, which are your F keys and you're trying them and nothing's working, go to your Apple menu, go to System Settings, then scroll down, click on "Keyboard", then click on "keyboard shortcuts", and then click on "Function Keys", and that is your on-off toggle. I hope that helps. I'm going to try to keep you guys updated if anything else changes. But so far that is the only thing that I have seen that has changed that will affect your ability to make your pattern for this class. Let's go ahead and test these actions. The first thing I'm going to do is delete this additional square. I want to expand my actions so I can see all the details under my half-drop set. If you click on the little arrow or caret here, where we have commands like move, you can inspect each action. You can do this with each one of them and that way you can go back and make sure that they're working, but I'm just going to test them visually. Let's test the first action which is Command F1. Command F1 on the cheat sheet is this square or anything needs to repeat from the left side 2,000 pixels to the right. This is a 2,000 pixel art board, right now our square is positioned right where the center of the square is touching the left edge of our art board. Now that I have that selected, I'm just going to go ahead and hold down Command F1. Now, you can see that it has been repeated exactly 2,000 pixels to the right, and it has been duplicated. That is our first action, that is working. I'm going to delete this second square here and then let's test the second action. Let's move the square up to the top of our artboard here where the center point of the square is touching the top edge of our artboard. Now remember, Command F2 is going to duplicate it and drop it down 1,000 pixels on the y-axis, which is vertically. If I hold down Command and F2, now you can see that the bottom square is touching the bottom edge of the artboard where the center point is. That means our second action is working. Let's test our third action. I'm going to delete this square. You know what? I'm going to put the center point of the square right where the center of the square touches the top left corner of our artboard. What should happen with Command F3 is this square should be duplicated exactly 1,000 pixels to the right. That's half of our artboard. It should hit right here in the middle and then 500 pixels down, which is half the height of our artboard. Our artboard is 1,000 pixels, we want it to come down here, 500 pixels. I'm going to hold down Command and hit F3. Low and behold, there it is. Awesome. That means our first three actions are working great. Let's go ahead and test the next three actions. I'm going to take the square and I'm going to go ahead and move it now to the bottom left corner. I'm going to use the Align tool here. You don't have to do this and that's going to align the edge. I'm just going to snap it. There we go. If you can see it here, there's a little dialog that pops up that says intersect, it's pink. That basically is telling you that center point, let's see where it says center, that center point is intersecting with the bottom left corner. What should happen with Command F4 is this square should be duplicated right back to where we were duplicating that other square. It should just be perfectly centered where the center point touches the center of our artboard. I'm going to hold down the Command button and click on F4. Yes, it's working. This is awesome. I'm super excited. If you ever realize that you created an action wrong, it's really easy to fix. All you have to do and I like to do it this way, is I'll shrink it down with the carrot here and you can just hit the trash can and recreate it. See how the action right here has this Command F3. That's the overall action, and then the details are down here. You can always just delete an action and go back and re-add it if you need to. Like I said, feel free to watch this as many times as you need to. Command F5 should then take this square here. Now, I can align it to the center because the center point is aligned to the center of the artboard. Command F5 should duplicate this square up here on the top left where the center point of our square touches the corner top left of our artboard. I'm going to hold down Command and hit F5. Yes, it works. Awesome. Okay, perfect. Now, I'm going to delete this square. The final command we created, which is Command F6, should duplicate this square down here to the bottom left where the center point of the square root this bottom left corner, so I'm going to hold down Command and hit F6. Awesome. It has all worked and we have successfully created six actions with keyboard shortcuts. Now remember, when you're doing this class, you don't have to use a square, you don't have to use my art, you can follow along with your own shape and your own art. The main thing is that when you're creating these actions, you just double-check your horizontal and vertical coordinates. Horizontal being x, vertical being y. Just double-check, triple check. If you ever get further into a project and you start realizing once you test your pattern and things and stuff is not lining up, just go back and check your actions. It is entirely possible these are a lot of numbers that something may have been missed, but it's okay. You have your action name here, you have your commands, you know you're copying it. Again, if you're not sure, you can just go ahead and delete it and re-add it. It really is a quick process. You only have to do this one time. If you're doing the same half-drop set I'm doing in the future, you don't ever have to do this again. If you want to create your own, you still only have to do it one time. I'm going to tell you one more thing here that can be really helpful. See how we're in our Actions panel here and we have our half-drop set. If you go to the top right of your Actions panel and there's that little three-lined menu, if you click on that, you can drop down and do you see where it says Save Actions? You can actually save your actions and export them. It's going to save as an aia.aia file, but if you ever are going to be updating Illustrator, which is highly likely, go ahead and save this as a backup. If you ever are worried about losing these, you can import them. You can import them in the same manner. You would just go up here and then you would go to Load Actions. You would go to the Actions panel, the top right where the three-line menu is, and then drop down to Load Actions. That way, you can keep them between versions. Illustrator does tend to keep your preferences if you tell it to when you're updating to a new version of Illustrator, but it can never hurt to have an extra backup. I always like to save. I have a folder on my computer called Backups which is little preferences like swatches and things like that. I have my actions saved in there. That is it. Let's move on to the next lesson. 10. Start Building Your Pattern: It is now time for the super fun part so now that we know our actions work, I am going to close the actions panel. I am also going to delete this layer that we were using to create and test our actions so I will just click the trash can at the bottom of my layers panel. Now I'm also going to hold down Command and hit the semicolon key and hide my quadrant for the moment and finally, I'm going to hit the eyeball next to my graphics layer so I can turn on my graphics and start building out this pattern. Let me remind you that these graphics are the ones that I've given you, but you can follow along with your own art so please feel free to use your own art for any of the pattern stuff that we're doing. I'm going to go ahead and unlock the graphics layer and the first thing that I like to do when I design patterns is I start with the largest elements first and then go down to the smaller ones. I'm going to take these smaller elements and move them off of the art board and I'm just going to start with the larger elements. Again, this is a matter of taste. I'm just going to lay them out into a formation that I find visually pleasing. This is all a matter of taste, so feel free to do this however you would like. This is just me eyeballing stuff and looking at what I think should go where color-wise and what might look nice in one place versus another so use your own creative instinct here. This is a rough overall layout where all of my elements are and I like to keep different colors separated from each other so I have these reds separated, these yellows. The leaves are spread out and then these pinks are over here. This is the way I like to design patterns now you don't have to do it this way, but with my half drops, I have a process that works like this. I'm going to take all of these elements actually and you know what I'm going to move this leaf. Let's see, I'm just going to leave it right there. I'm going to take all of these elements and I'm going to group them. I'm holding down command and the letter G and now I'm going to shrink them a tiny bit so that they're all inside my art board here and I'm going to align them all to the center. Now, this is just a very loose overview, pattern creation, as you know, is just a lot of playing around and looking at how things look. They're centered, I'm going to actually shrink them a tiny bit more and I'm going to center them again. Now, this is what I like to do. If I take these objects and click on them, I'm going to repeat these objects in all four corners, so that is going to be F3 down here to the right, F4 up here to the right, F5 up to the left, and F6 down to the left. Now, I have these keyboard shortcuts memorized, these actions memorized but that may seem a little weird to you, but if you do this enough, you're going to memorize them too. I'm just going to hit "Command F3" so now these have been duplicated as a group right down here to the right. I'm going to do the same thing and hit "Command F4" and now they have been duplicated up here to the right on the top so I'm going to hit "Command F5" and now they have been duplicated to the top left and I'm going to hit "Command F6." Now you can start seeing how this system works. I'm going to hold down the Command key and hit the semicolon and now you can see this is where our quadrant is. Do you see how for instance, with this leaf here, it hangs over the bottom edge, and then this yellow flower is positioned where the quadrant is around here, and then these pink flowers here, and then this leaf is down here? If you look and imagine where these lines are, see how they match up with these lines and see how the bottom, where the leaf has this space down here is the same as the space here; it's also the same as this space here. This is what I was saying in a previous video, once you start visualizing how this quadrant works, and you start getting used to it you can really just look at the pattern as you're designing it and just really instinctively know what goes with what. Now you also with these elements because they are also large, you can see this flower, this flower, this yellow flower here is all the same one, same thing with this leaf really just because they are so distinctive from each other too. Now, this is the way I like to start designing my patterns, and let me show you another cool trick that I like to use, so I'm going to go back and ungroup these. The way I'm doing that is holding down the Command key, hitting the Shift key, and then hitting the letter G for group that ungroups them. You can also go to, for instance, if you have an ungrouped set here, you can go to Object and Ungroup so if you go to the Illustrator menu and drop down, click on Object and drop down to Ungroup, that will also ungroup them, and here's a little hint, that's your keyboard shortcut that's what we just did. That is the Shift Command G. I'm going to go through and ungroup all of these sets that I have and now, this is where I have a trick for you that is going to make everything a lot simpler. Do you see how this Monstera here is the same as all these other ones? Go ahead and click on that top-right Monstera or whatever you are using. Then hold down Shift and click on the other one, and hold down Shift and click on all of them. Now, hold down the Command key on your keyboard or a Control key on your PC, Command key on the Mac, and hit the letter G again. Now, they're all grouped so I'm going to undo that, let's do that really quickly with all of our objects so you can tell what goes with what these are oops, I moved it let me undo that, that was Command Z; don't want to do that. We want to make sure we don't move any of these and before we do anything else, we just regroup each individual element, each individual piece of art, so that they're all connected to each other and so that's what I'm doing now. I'm going to go do this yellow flower really quick here and I'm just selecting all of them and grouping the like objects so you can see how this pink flower here, this is repeated in the same position. Let's see what else do I have left that I haven't grouped? This leaf here and this is where grouping things really becomes your friend. Now, if you're like, I'm going to move that, you don't have to move all four of them you only have to move one. Like this yellow flower you're like, well, I want it up there. Now, it's going to be completely, perfectly repeated in the exact spot that it needs to be. I forgot this flower here. You don't have to repeat or you don't have to go through and move each one and then duplicate it again. Now sometimes I will do that depending on what's going on and I forgot this flower. I'm just going through and clicking on them and grouping them. This is what I like to do and then when I start fine tuning my pattern, now, I can just move things around and I only have to move one thing so I focus on the main motif and as I start filling in this space here, it's really helpful because then I just put an element here and then repeat it and then group it and then it's just a matter of quick fine tuning. In the next lesson, we're going to be fine tuning this pattern. Let me give you one more little tip. If you've ever seen the demasque patterns, I think that's how you pronounce it, those are similar to this layout where it's like a motif, not exactly like this, but usually it's symmetrical and you'll see where demasque motif, that's usually symmetrical and often I like to center them in the middle. They're repeated like this and then there's usually some smaller elements filled in so this method that I'm doing is a great way to create demasque patterns. Now you don't have to use it for that; that's not what we're doing in this class but if you ever want to create one of those cool symmetrical patterns that has a main really big motif that's symmetrical and then has some other little symmetrical elements that are just repeated like this way, this process really lends itself to that. Let's go on and in the next lesson we're going to be fine tuning this pattern, filling in these spaces. I'll show you some tips and tricks that I like to use to make my patterns visually interesting and we'll just keep doing this fun design part. [MUSIC] 11. Fine Tune Your Pattern: In this lesson, we are going to start fine-tuning our pattern. I'm going to turn off the quadrant by hiding the guides. This is the way I like to do it. Again, you don't have to do it this way. I am going to move over here to the right. I'm going to rubber band around these graphics. I am going to hold down the Option key and I am just going to drag them down as I'm holding the Option key, which is duplicating all of them. I'm just going to drag them down with my mouse and they're all still grouped. Now, I'm going to go through and ungroup all of these because I was grouping them just to show you how I like to make things a little easier for myself. Right now, I'm just going through really quickly. Let me make sure they're all ungrouped from each other. Now I'm going through and just deleting everything except for one set of these. Great. Now, one thing I also want to do is I'm going to go ahead and lock all of these elements for now. I've just rubber-banded around all of them in the main pattern. I'm going to hold down command and I'm going to hit the number 2 on my keyboard, so now, you can't move them. If you like where these are, this is a great way to be like, okay, I don't want to move those, so I'm locking them and then they just stay where they are. Now, this is the way I like to design my patterns. It's all aesthetic. I'm definitely going to want to use some more of these elements, but I don't want to necessarily take the same flower, like this yellow flower, and just put it there, it's of the same size, it's the same angle as the existing one. I'm going to take that flower and I'm just going to rotate it a little bit. Let's resize it. I'm just going to hold down the Shift key and resize it, and I'm going to rotate it a little more here. There we go. Now, I'm just going to start playing around. You can watch me do this. I'm probably going to speed up this video a little bit. What I'm doing right now is just playing around and resizing. Here's another thing I'd like to do. Let's take this flower here. I'm going to make this red flower bigger because there isn't enough red in this pattern for me. I'm going to make that bigger. Here's another thing I'd like to do. If you have your object selected, you can go to Object in your Illustrator menu. Go to Transform, and then go to Reflect. You can reflect things horizontally or vertically and you can just click these options and see what you like. I like the horizontal. Now, I'm going to click on Okay. Not only have I changed the size of this flower, but it's completely in a different position it's reflected. Obviously, it is the same flower as this little red one, but it really, to the eye, it visually is different enough that it's interesting. I have taken this yellow flower here, and I'm going to put this red flower about here. Cool. Now, you may remember from before that everything that's on the top needs to be mirrored or repeated on the bottom. It also has to be, of course, and I'm going to turn on my quadrant again, anything in the top-left needs to be mirrored or repeated in the bottom right. Actually, I'm going to move this off the art board. Let's start repeating these elements. The keyboard shortcut for this, to repeat this in the right place, and there's two places we need to repeat this. To duplicate this flower down to the bottom here is Command F2. Now, I'm going to click back on that flower and it's Command F3 to mirror it or repeat it over here. There. Now, let me group these. I'm not going to move them at all. I'm not going to resize them. I clicked on all of them. Hold down Command and the letter G. Now, these are all grouped. Let's do the same thing with this red flower. This red flower, do you see how the red flower is not touching the quadrant? It's not touching the art board. We only have to repeat this flower for now. Unless we do move it and it touches an art board, we only have to repeat it once, up here to the right. The reason we repeated this yellow flower twice is because not only does it need to be repeated from the top border, where it touches a border of your art board down to the bottom, but it also always needs to be repeated from the top left to the bottom right. Let's hit Command F4 and now we have our red flower repeated right where it needs to be. I've clicked on both hold down Command and the letter G. Great. Let's see. I resized my Monstera. Let's see. Where's a good place where there aren't a lot of Monsteras? This will be a good example. Let's say I put my Monstera up here, and I'm like, yeah, that looks okay. Maybe I'll just rotate it a little bit. Now, if I hit Command F2, look what just happened. It is now on top of an existing graphic that I've already placed and I like where it is, so I'm going to delete that. Another thing that I like to do, and you really can just do this your own way and play around with it. Let me move this Monstera away. I am going to unlock all. I'm going to go to Object in my Illustrator menu and unlock all. Now, you see how this leaf down here is really close to the border, it doesn't need to be repeated up here because it's not touching the edge of our art board. However, in the pattern, even though it's not showing here, it will be up here somewhere because this is a repeating pattern. Sometimes, you see all of these elements are outside the art board, you're not going to see those, but I like to be able to visually see where things are going to be any way. I'm going to ungroup these. If I click on this leaf here and I hit Command F5 for the sake of your design, you can see that it is going to end up there. Now you know how much space you have in your pattern to place another object. Just to make things easy, I'm going to go ahead and group all four of these, I've clicked on all of them and I'm going to hold down command and hit G. Now, we can put that Monstera somewhere that we think makes sense and let's see. You know what? I'm going to come back to that. I may not repeat that Monstera because it's really big and it's really distinctive and that's okay. We really have a lot of space filled in already. We have this leaf here. I'm going to make it a little smaller and I'm going to object, transform, and reflect it and I am not going to reflect it horizontally, but I am going to reflect it vertically. Again, this is all aesthetics. It might be cool to have it here because it's reflecting and stuff like that. This is just me playing around, so let's do this. No. I'm going to leave it there my first instinct was good. If we want to repeat this, I'm gong to hit Command F5 and you'll see that it's not touching the art board down here, so you only have to repeat it once. But you know what I am going to do anyway is I'm going to click on this leaf here on the left, and I'm going to hit Command F4. Now, you can see, if you start putting something here, that that leaf is going to end up there anyway. I'm going to click on all three of these and I am going to group them. I think we're good on leaves for now. This pink flower, I love this pink, I think it's cool, I want to make it bigger. Let's make it larger. I'm going to reflect this and I'm just going to look and see what I think might look good. Actually, I like the vertical reflect, this is an amoeba like flower here. Let's see. I'm going to start filling in this space here. You can see that flower is a little bit too big. That is the same space as here so I'm going to zoom in. In order to zoom in, I hold down command and hit the plus sign on my keyboard. Now, I'm fine tuning, I'm just going to shrink it a little bit more, it's still bigger than it was. What's cool is when you start doing organic shapes like this, you can really just eyeball things and play around and see what you think about the way things look. Let's see. There we go. That works for me. I'm going to zoom out, which is a command, and then the minus sign or the dash. Here we go. Let's go ahead and hit Command F3. Now, you see that it has been repeated from the top left to the bottom right but notice how it's touching this art board right here. That means, because this is the edge of our pattern, this edge of this art board, see how that little piece of the flower and that little tiny piece is hanging off the edge, that means it has to be repeated up here too. Anytime it touches an art board, you can just duplicate it down here and be done. Click on the original flower and hit Command F4. Now, where this flower stops down here, it gets repeated again up here. Let me group these. I'm just going to go through now and play around with the layout. This is just fine tuning, do whatever you think looks nice, I cannot wait to see what you end up creating. Everyone is different and I love seeing how everyone approaches art. I'm going to speed up this video a little bit and fill in the space and I cannot wait to see your version of this. Real quick. Before I speed up this video, do you see how this red flower is in the top center of the pattern? I have to not only repeat this flower at the top and the bottom, I also have to repeat it at the left and the right. You'll see now that I'm repeating this flower on the top center, the bottom center, but it also has to be repeated on the far-right, touching the right side of the art board and the far-left. You'll have to play around with it but sometimes you need to make sure that not only are things repeated on the top-left to the bottom-right, the bottom-left to the top-right, but everything that touches the top of the art board has to touch the bottom and be repeated in the same place. Everything that touches the left side of the art board has to be repeated on the right side of the art board in the same place. I feel like this pattern, let me turn off the quadrant, is looking pretty good. I liked the way it looks. It's got a lot of varied shape and color. In the next lesson, we're going to start adding our accents and really filling in this space a little bit more. I really like to fill in a lot of blank space with my patterns. This is totally up to you and I will see you in the next lesson. 12. Add Accents & Finish Your Pattern: [MUSIC] Our pattern overall, I think, looks pretty cool, yours probably looks different from mine, but that's okay. [LAUGHTER] Let's go ahead and fill in some of of these spaces. I like to fill in blank spaces in my patterns, that's just me. I'm going to go ahead and lock this graphics layer because I'm done with it and I'm going to hit the eyeball next to the accents layer and I'm going to unlock it. I'm just going to go ahead and rubber band around all these. If you want to make sure you get all of them, you can hit Command A, and I'm just going to move them down here off the artboard. Now, I have these little dots grouped already for you so you don't have to group each dot with the other ones, but you can play around. I'm going to turn my quadrant back on, and now I am just going to do one of these and show you it's the same process. I'm moving these dots. Actually, I'm going to move them over here, and I'm going to turn the quadrant off again and see how I feel about what that looks like. Yeah, that looks pretty good. Now, I'm going to turn the quadrant back on so I can make sure I see where these are being repeated. This little set of dots here is over here on the right, do you see how it's touching the horizontal line of my quadrant guide? Let me go ahead and repeat this. If I click on these dots and I hit Command F5, see how they were repeated up here to the top left, but they're also touching this top of the artboard, which means they also have to be repeated down here at the bottom of the artboard. I can click on these and hit Command F2, and now they're repeated, that set of dots. Let me go ahead and do one more set. Let me take this set of dots and I'm going to drop it over here on the left. Now, these are touching the left side of the artboard and our Command, I'm going to click on those, F1 key will repeat those over there on the right. But remember just because they're repeated on the left and right, these are on the bottom left so they also need to be repeated on the top right, up here. Let me go ahead, actually that's going to be right here, and click on those and hit Command F4. Now, they're repeated left and right and then also from the bottom-left to the top-right, it's kind of the top-right, it's the center of the quadrant. Let me group these. I group things as I go. So as soon as I duplicate things, I immediately group them. I'm going to go through in a second and do this a little faster, but I think you get the idea. You're going to do the same thing, you're going to fill in space, and everywhere you see something touching the artboard, of course, it always has to be repeated top-left to bottom-right, bottom-left to top-right, but every time it touches an artboard, it also always has to repeat because this is the same of your pattern from the top to the bottom and the left to the right. Let's say you're like, you know what? I want to move these over here. You can just drag things around and move them. But keep in mind. Here's a great example. See how I just move these dots up here. Let's say I'm like, you know what? I'm going to put them here. Now, you have to ungroup these, so I'm going to ungroup them, and you have to repeat them again because they were grouped in the old formation. But that does not mean that they're just going to magically repeat wherever. Now that these dots are here, the other ones are way off the artboard, we need to repeat them. Here we are at the top, now you want to hit Command F2, and Command F2 will duplicate these dots on the bottom. This set of dots was repeated from the top to the bottom and from the top-left to the bottom-right. When I first started designing like this, I wasn't super fast. But once I created two or three patterns using this quadrant system method with actions and keyboard shortcuts, I got a lot faster. Now, once I have my art ready, I can literally create a half-drop pattern in a few minutes, and I can also tweak patterns in minutes because my objects are grouped. This workflow will end up saving you so much time in the future. Now, I'm going to speed up this video and finish filling in space with these accents. I cannot wait to see how your half-drop patterns turn out. [MUSIC] I'm liking the way this pattern looks, I think it looks pretty cool. The next lesson is going to be where we test this pattern in Photoshop and see what we think about the overall look of it. So I'll see you in the next lesson. [MUSIC] 13. Save & Test Your Pattern: [MUSIC] I like the way this pattern looks. Now what we want do is save our pattern block. I'm going to go to File and I'm going to go to Export. We are going to go to Export As. I'm going to export this file as a PNG. You can export it as a JPEG. I just prefer using PNG files, and I am just going to export it to my desktop. What you always want to make sure you do is you want to click on the box that says Use Artboards. What that's doing is it's taking the information from this artboard and it's going to export just what's on the artboard. Now remember, we have not done a clipping mask. Our background color is hanging over our artboard and so is all of our art and we want to leave it like that. There's no hair lines in between our scenes. You want to click on, Use Artboards. We only have one artboard, so I'm going to click on All and then I'm going to hit "Export". Now the next dialog box that pops up is your resolution and I always export at 300 pixels per inch because that is the highest quality and that way you ensure that you're going to get the highest quality image. Also, I use my background color as transparent because I have my blue background color in this file. Go ahead and click on, "Okay, " then it'll take a second and then we should be good to go. Now what we want to do is go to Photoshop and open Photoshop and we're going to open that file that we just saved. I'm going to click "Command O" and it is on my desktop. I have my PNG file here, and that is what I named it. You'll also notice, see where it has that dash O1. That means that's artboard 1. You can rename that. I often do because that can get a little confusing. But for right now, I'm just going to leave it at that and I'm going to click on Open. Now we can see this is our half-drop pattern block. Now what we want to do is test this pattern. The first thing we need to do is define this block as our pattern block. If you go to Edit and then you drop down to Define Pattern, what will happen is you have this pop-up box and this is actually defining in Photoshop this block as your pattern block. You'll see in a minute why we're doing this. Go ahead and click on Okay. It doesn't look like anything happened, but what we want to do is let's create a new Photoshop file. You can either go to File New or hit "Command N" for new and I learned this from another Skillshare teacher who I adore. I create a new file that is 12,000 pixels wide by 12,000 pixels high and I set my resolution at 300. We're testing this right now. The color mode is RGB because I designed my file in RGB and the resolution matches the resolution that I outputted my pattern block as. Go ahead and click on "Create" and now we have a new file and it is blank. What we want to do is we want to fill this 12,000 pixel by 12,000 pixel square with that defined pattern block so we can see it repeating in action. If you go to Layer and then you drop down to New Fill Layer here, you'll see at the bottom it has pattern. Click on that and you'll get this pop up that is just asking you if you want to fill this layer with a pattern and it doesn't matter what you name it, just click on "Okay". This is just the default pattern that Photoshop gives you. You'll probably recognize this if you're following along. Don't worry about that. In this pop-up box, see where this little down arrow is on the right. Click on that and we're going to pick our pattern. I have a lot of patterns in here. But if you go to the very bottom, you'll see that our pattern that we defined is right here. Actually, if you hover over it, that's our file name. Click on that and look, magically, our pattern has appeared. Isn't it cool to see it in action? [LAUGHTER] First of all, I always keep my angle at zero. What would happen if you didn't do it at zero is it would literally rotate your pattern, but I'm going to leave that at zero. But you can start playing with scale here. But before we do that, I'm going to click on "Okay" and let's zoom in and make sure that all of those actions and keyboard shortcuts we set up worked. Everything should line up perfectly and we should not see any hairlines of any kind at all. We shouldn't see any partial graphics. We shouldn't see any partial dots. If you ever do go in and inspect it, I'm just going around and looking with my eyes at how everything looks. But if you ever at this step and you're like, uh-oh, there's half a yellow flower there or something looks weird just go back to your file, especially if you see a partial element like a split, like this flower is only half of it is showing that means you didn't repeat it somewhere. But it's very easy to fix. Just go back and examine everything, look at what you have, and make sure that it looks like everything is repeating in the right place as many times as it needs to. This looks really good. I'm really happy with this. Now let me show you another cool trick that I love doing. Let me zoom out so you can see the whole block. Go to your layer here where your pattern is and double-click on that layer thumbnail and it pulls back up that box we were looking at previously. Do you see this scale here? What happens if we type 50 in? What it does is now we can see this pattern at a distance, at a really far distance, and see what we think maybe as what is this going to look like really small? What if you have this on fabric and somebody wants it really tiny? You can even go all the way down as far as you want and really look at this and see, okay, how does that flow? Do you like the way the rhythm of this pattern? Do you feel like it's varied enough? Do you feel like there's anything that's really standing out that feels weird. This is a great way to just quickly look at your pattern and see what you think and get an overall impression of what it look going to like when it's repeated. I'm just going to ahead and click on "Okay". See how these Monstera leaves are at a diagonal. See how these red flowers are at a diagonal and more staggered. If this had been a basic repeat, which is a completely great way to do patterns, these red flowers, for instance, would just be right next to each other. But they repeat, they drop down every other flower here. It just really flows better. It gives you a better rhythm in your pattern, in my opinion. I just want to say congratulations, you have accomplished so many things in this class. You've learned a workflow that's going to save you time. You've created a half-drop pattern block and you've tested it. So you know it repeats seamlessly. In the future when you use my workflow to create pattern blocks with your own art, you can upload your file like the PNG file we saved earlier to websites like Spoonflower and sell your own patterns online. [MUSIC] 14. Thank You! Final Thoughts...: [MUSIC] Congratulations. You just created a half-drop pattern using a system that is going to save you time in the future. Now, you can focus on the fun part of creating patterns, which is creating the artwork. Now you can automate tedious processes like repeating design elements. You're one step closer to earning income from your surface pattern designs. Don't forget, you can set up actions and keyboard shortcuts for repeating elements in basic repeat patterns too. I know this was a lot of information but don't let overwhelm steal your joy. Pattern design can be a bit of a learning curve, but I have given you the tools to help you save time when creating half-drop patterns in Adobe Illustrator so in the future you can work smarter, not harder. Now you have the power to make sure that your patterns work perfectly for a variety of mediums. You can always come back and watch portions of this class or the entire class anytime you need a refresher. It will always be here for you. I would love to see what you have created. Please share your projects in the project gallery and on social media. Please tag me @CarrieCantwellArt so I can see and comment on your beautiful creations. I cannot wait to see how you interpret half-drop patterns for the project in this class. I want to sincerely thank you for watching this class. This was my first Skillshare class and I was driven to teach it because had I had all of this information at my fingertips when I first started surface pattern design, it would have saved me so much time and headache. Please follow me using the follow link next to my profile and stay tuned. I plan to teach more Skillshare classes in the future. Thank you again and I will see you next time. Bye-bye.