Real Time Mandala Design in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Real Time Mandala Design in Adobe Illustrator - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, real time mandala design in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working on applications such as, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're going to create the structure for designing a mandala in real time. This is an extension of my previous class on mirror drawing and it takes the concept one step further, into designing a mandala structure. You will learn how to setup the document, how to use it. I also have some really cool ideas for creating mandalas using readily available shapes and flourishes. As you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others, please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, answer yes to the fact that you would recommend this class to others. Secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now let's get started with a real time mandala design in Illustrator. 2. Pt 1 - Set up the document: If you took my earlier class on creating mirror designs in Illustrator, you'll be fairly familiar with the process that we're going through in setting up this document. As a result, I'm going to move through the setup just a little bit more quickly this time. If you want to find out more about the mirror image drawing class, then I've included a link to it in the class project area, just so that you can find it a little more easily. We're going to start with a new document choosing File New, I'm selecting 1000 by 1000 pixels. That's a square documents, since this is a circular Mandela, that makes sense. I have disabled align new objects to pixel grid. I'm clicking Okay. In more recent versions of illustrator, the option for aligning new objects to a pixel grid is up here, in the top corner. Now, we need to create a triangle as the basis of the shape that we are going to be rotating for our Mandela. So I'm going to the polygon tool, I'm going to click once in the middle of the document. I'm going to create a object that has three sides and it does not matter at all what the radius is, so I just type anything for the radius and click Okay. This creates a triangle and it's an equilateral triangle, all the sides are equal. Now we're going to turn off the fill on the shape,and this is really important that you focus very carefully on when shapes have fills and when they don't. Now for this triangle, we're going to adjust its size, so we're going up here with its selected to these values here, it has a width and a height, and there's a little link in between them. Well, you want to undo that link, and you want your triangle to have a height of 500 pixels, so we're just going to type 500 in here. For its width, you're going to type in the value. I'm just going to put this in as an overlay because it's a big number, 267.95. Then just press Enter. This triangle is now going to be aligned to the bottom of the art board. I'm going to select the triangle and just click here on vertical aligned bottom, because I have the option to align to art board already selected. If you don't, you'll need to go and select that, and of course if you don't see any of these aligned settings, you can always choose Window, Align, to open up the aligned dialogue which got all these settings in it. We're also going to center this in the middle of the art board. This is our starting shape, but before we go on, I just want to show you very quickly where the 267.95 came from. To calculate the width of the base of the triangle, I went to this website and I'm going to give you the link again in the class project area. It's an isosceles triangle calculated because that's what we're creating. I knew the top angle here, I knew I wanted it to be 30 degrees, so that we can rotate this around to create our Mandela. I also knew I wanted it to be as high as half the height of the document, and because we were working with an art board that was 100 pixels tall, then this height had to be half of that so it would be 500. What I did was I went to the Select elements area and you can tell this application, what you know, and I knew the height and the vertex angle. I chose that option here. Then I typed my heighten as 500 and my vertex angle as 30, and click Execute. This told me that the base of the triangle, the width of the triangle, needed to be 267.94917, etc. I just rounded that up to 267.95. So anytime that you need to work out the dimensions of a triangle, something like this online calculator will help you. Before we finish up with our triangle shape, we're going to the layers palette, and you'll probably want to open the last pallet up because you're going to need to have access to it as you work. I'm just going to size up my layer thumbnails a little bit, making it a little bit easier to say. Now, right now this shape is called polygon, so what I'm going to call it is triangle shape, clipping mask. I'm going to make a duplicate of it, then we're going to call this overlay showing, where you can draw. I suggest that you name these objects the same as I have because it's going to make it very clear in a minute, where they all need to go and their placement in the structure is critical for this to work. 3. Pt 2 - Finish the template: Next up we need the same two shapes as we created in the mirror drawing. We need a rectangle that is the size of the art board. I'm just selecting the rectangle tool and typing in the width and height as 100. I'm going to make sure that this is centered over the top of the art board. I'm going to turn it stroke and fill off sorts of no strike, no fill Rectangle. I'm going to call this art board size clipping mask. Then we're going to make a shape that's double the size of the art board. Again, click on the "Rectangle" tool. This time it's going to be 2,000 by 2,000 pixels. Again, it's going to be centered on the art board. Again, it's going to have no fill, but you can give this a stroke if you wish, because this is going to show you where you can't draw. This rectangle is going to be called Don't Draw Outside Me. Now you can take your art board size clipping mask, which has a shape that is the size of the art board, drag it onto the new icon to make a duplicate of it and call this one background. At this point, you can fill the background in with a color if you want to, or you can just set it to white. This is going to be the area behind your artwork. Now because it's filled with white and it's on top of these triangles, it's just hidden those triangles for now. The other thing you'll want is just a shape because you need to check to make sure that things are actually working when we get to start to create the clipping masks and everything. What you want to do is just come immediately below the center of the art board and you just want to draw a something now. I'm drawing a red, orange filled circle. That is just a testing shape. You want to say that it's mirroring and rotating correctly as we put this document together. Right now we have Layer 1 with all these bits and pieces in it. We're going to click on "Layer 1", so it is selected, and then we're going to click here on "Create New Layer". We're going to do it three times, so we have Layer 1, 2, 3 and 4. Between Layer 3 and Layer 4 is going the overlay showing where you can draw, so it's this thing down here, this little triangles. I'm just pushing it up and it's going to go on Layer 4. You can see when I open up the disclosure triangle for Layer 4, this overlay is in there, so it's now in the right place. Now, Layer 2 and Layer 3 need to be inside Layer 1. I'm just going to drag Layer 2 in here and then Layer 3 is going to be inside Layer 2, which is itself inside Layer 1. When we open up these little disclosure triangles, we're going to have Layer 1, 2 and 3 and they're going to be on this angle because they are nested. We're going to take the art board size clipping mask and it's going to be dropped in Layer 1 above Layer 2. It's actually not going on Layer 2, but it's just going into this position. It's at the same level as Layer 2 and it's inside Layer 1. Don't Draw Outside Me is going into Layer 2. It's going to drop it here and it will be in the same position as Layer 3. In Layer 3 it's going the triangle shape clipping mask, and also the shape whatever it is that you happen to have drawn to be your test shape. We're going to open up Layer 3 because it's critical at this point that the triangle shape clipping mask is at the top of this layer and the ellipse is underneath. If they're not in that order, they're not going to work. At this point you want to take your selection tool, you want to click away so that nothing at all is selected here. That's critical. Again, you can't create clipping mask while anything is selected. I'm just going to click on Layer 1. I'm not clicking this selector here. I just want to have Layer 1 selected so it's a different color. I'm going to click the down pointing arrow here and click make clipping mask. Art boards sides clipping mask has an underline underneath it because it is now a clipping mask for that layer. We're going to do the same down here with Layer 3, make sure nothing is selected. Click and choose "Make Clipping Mask" and the triangle ship clipping mask is now the clipping mask for that layer. Now you can reverse the order of those if you wish to do so. Now we're going to target Layer 2. I'm just going to click on Layer 2 and we need to do our transforms. I'll choose effect, distort, and transform. I'll turn preview on. I need one copy of this. I need to reflect it over the x axis and I need to rotate it 30 degrees. It's really important that your rotation point for this is dead in the center here. It may not seem like it should be, but it does need to be one copy so that you have one of these copies here and 30 degree rotation, click "Okay". With everything still selected, effect, distort, and transform, click, "Apply New Effect". This time you're going to rotate 60 degrees. Turn preview on, you need five copies. The end result should be on the screen that you're seeing. This circle rotated all the way around your art board. Now if you didn't get your circle dead in the middle, like I didn't, it's going to be slightly off all the way around. That's fine. The rotation is working fine. Click "Okay". At this point we have everything set up. What I'm going to do is lock down my background, I'm going to lock down my triangle shape clipping mask. I'm also going to open up this Layer 4 because I have this overlay showing where you can draw. Now this is really handy because it is actually literally showing you where the rotation point is. You want to be drawing in this area, so I'm going to lock it down as well. You can also lock down the outboard size clipping mask, so you making sure that nothing moves except the things that you want to be able to move. We're going to this ellipse and I'm just going to select it and backspace to delete it. If you wanted to, you could actually leave that in place. It might be useful to leave it in place while you save this as a template just so that you know where your drawing is going to go when you actually come to use it. I suggest you save it at this point, and in the next video we're going to come back and actually make a Mandala using it. 4. Pt 3 - Make a mandala with flourishes: Now one of the ways that you can create mandalas really quickly and really easily using our design is to use some prepackaged flourishes. I've gone to Vecteezy which is a source for freely downloadable vectors, and I found three sets of vector shapes that you may want to download. This one's a bit finer, and these two are thicker. I'm going to give you the links to each of these in the class project area just in case you want to use them. But basically, you could use any shapes. I'm just looking here. Although these are premium designs, you could use these shapes in your mandala. You just want something that is going to be interesting when it repeats. We're back in Illustrator now. What I did was I went ahead and downloaded all of those vector flourish shapes. Some of them will come as ZIP files and some of them might just come as AI files, but I've checked to make sure that all of these are in actual fact vectors. If they come in a ZIP file and you're on a Windows machine, you'll probably need to unzip them and then you'll just open the AI files. Now, what you find inside these files is going to depend pretty much on how they were put together. I'm just opening this up, and in this one, all of these shapes were individual paths. In this one, the shapes are inside groups, so they're a whole heap of groups here. In this one, again, a whole series of groups. You'll just need to open up the last panel and see what it is that you're going to be selecting when you use the shapes. I'm going to start with this shape here. But if I remember rightly with this one, it's actually got a path that at the very bottom here that is the size of the whole document. It's really just providing a white background, and it's a real nuisance because every time you grab at something, it comes with you. I suggest that if you're using this set of flourishes, just scroll down to the very end, that very last shape, and just delete it because it's just going to get in your way. So let's go back here. I'm going to select over this shape. I'm going to choose "Edit," "Copy." I'm going back to my mandala template. Of course, the action place is around here, so I'm just going to choose "Edit," "Paste." The shape is pasted over the middle of the document. You can see that it's already rotating, but since I can select it here in the last palette, I'm just going to select all the pieces that go to make up that shape, and now I'm just going to drag it down into this triangle. Immediately, the shape is being rotated into the mandala so you could make it smaller and you can reposition it. Every time you move it, you'll see live on the screen exactly how the mandala is going to look with it placed in that position. So one way of creating your mandala is just borrowing some free flourishes, and using them to create elements for your mandala. You just select them and copy them, go back to your mandala, choose "Edit," "Paste," and then go and move them into position. You can size, and rotate them, and do all sorts of things with them to get an interesting mandala as a result. Just be aware as you would have been if you took that mirror image drawing class to make sure that all of your data is going inside layer 3. You want to make sure that all the drawing is inside layer 3. If it isn't and it goes somewhere else, then you're going to need to move it inside layer 3 because that's where the rotation is taking place. Now, once you've created this mandala, If you want to, you can turn off the overlay showing where you can draw. Up here, I've got it locked down. I can just turn it's visibility off by unlocking it and turn it's visibility off, and that will allow you to see the mandala without that triangle in the way. 5. Pt 4 - Expand the Mandala and Make a Pattern: Before we go ahead and see how we would create a Mandala from scratch using our own design, I'm going to answer a question I know a lot of you already have. That is, how can I use this element in a design? For example, how could I use this as an element to make a pattern within Illustrator? Well, what you can't do is just select this and choose object pattern make, for example, because it's all going to break into lots of little pieces because it was never designed to do that. What we have to do is to prepare the document so that we could turn it into an actual shape that we can do something with. Before we do that, however, you want to choose File and then Save As and save the original document with this rotation structure in it. The reason for this is that if later on you want to come back in and make some changes to it, you don't want to destroy the structure that is allowing you to add elements to this design and have them repeat throughout the design. Because what we're about to do in the next step is going to destroy all that ability. You want a copy of your original. Next up, you'll want to go and unlock anything that was locked. You'll want to make sure that things like this triangle here, for example, are not showing because you don't want to see that in the final display. Now there is a shape that's going to cause us a lot of distress later on if we don't do something about it right now. It's they don't draw outside maze. It's a shape that is all the way outside our document. We can't actually see it and we can't delete it because if I try and delete it now look what happens, the whole thing just gets destroyed. We can't delete it, but I'm telling you now that it's going to be a real embarrassment later on. What I'm going to do is select this shape and if you didn't previously add a stroke to it, do it now. Give it a stroke color and don't make it black, just make it a color that is nowhere in your Mandala because we need to be able to isolate and get rid of it later on. Once the preparation is done, you're going to choose, Select All and then Object, Expand Appearance. That breaks this out into the component paces. At this point each of these little triangles that are appearing on the screen as I hover over them, contains actual content. If I were to add something to the document such as a dot down here, you can see it's not being rotated and reflected because that's all being broken at this point. Now we're going to get this art board size clipping mask, and I'm going to select it and just delete it. I'm going to delete the overlay showing where you can draw. I'm just going to make it visible. Click on it to select it, press Backspace to delete it. I'm also going to delete layer four because it has nothing in it. You can see there's no disclosure triangle here. It's an empty layer and I'm just going to trash it. You'll see here you have layer 1 and then two layer 2s. Inside layer 2, is a whole series of groups. The quickest way to break these groups out so that they're not in a series of nested layers is to click on the topmost group, shift click on the bottom-most group so that they're selected here. They are not actually selected on these indicators here, but they just selected within the last palate and just drag them up and put them immediately between layer 1 and layer 2. That just moves them up and removes those nested layers. Layer 2 now has nothing in it so we can trash it. Now what we're left with is just these red areas. I'm going to get the zoom tool, I'm going to hold Alt or Option so I can just zoom out so we can see what the problem is and this is why we made them red because we need to be able to see them. What I'm going to do is just target one of these and continue to click on it until I can get to see where it is. I am now in isolation mode and I can trace where it is. I'm just going to click in here to open this up. This is it. This is this path here. What I'm going to do is just select it, so it's the only thing selected. Now I have this selected, I want to escape out of isolation mode, but I still have it selected and we know it has a red stroke and it has no fill. I'm going to choose Select, Same, Fill and Stroke. That's going to select every other instance of this rectangle that has a red stroke and no fill and because they're all selected and nothing else is, I'm just going to press the delete key and they're all disappearing. Now we've got rid of all of those rectangles outside the art board. We had to do it this way because we had to make sure that they were still then when we did our expansion, otherwise, we would have lost our shape entirely. This is what we're left with. This is the shape that we can now do something with. Before I do that, I'm just going to lock down the background because the background is a white fill and I don't actually want to do anything including the background. I'm going to select over the shape and at this stage, I'm just going to make it a bit smaller. With it selected, I can now go and make it into a pattern. If you're using Illustrator CS6 or later, this is how you're going to do it. Object, Pattern, Make. You'll click "Okay." I'm going to select a brick by row. I'm going to reduce the space between these. I've got this icon here locked. I'm just going to hold the Shift key as I bring these a little bit closer together and when I'm happy, I'm just going to click "Done." I'm going to move this out of the way for a minute. Create a rectangle the size of the art board. Make sure it's centered on the art board. Make sure I target my fill and I'm just going to fill it with my new pattern. Object, Transform scale, and I'm going to turn off transform objects, I'm going to turn on preview. I'm just going to reduce it to 50 percent. Then we have our Mandala that's been expanded now to form a series of shapes that we can use as a pattern, for example, in Illustrator. Now if you're using Illustrator CS6 or later, you can go ahead to the next video, if you're using Illustrator CS5 or CS4, stick with me because we're going to make this into a patent for you as well. I'm just going to delete that. I'm going to put this one back in here and I want it to be centered over everything. I'm just going to make sure that everything inside this layer here is inside a group, so I'm selecting everything so I can group it. Object, Group. With a group, I can now center it on the art board. I'm going to make a duplicate of it. I'm going to move the duplicate so that it is centered over the top corner of this art board. It's x and y position for the center point, so the reference point here is set to the center and its x and y are zero. I'm going to select this shape, Object, Transform, Move. Zero out of these settings. I'm going to move it horizontally 1,000 pixels, and I'm going to create a copy of it. Now I've got two shapes here. Now I am going to select both these shapes. Object, Transform, Move, preview turned on. I'm going to zero out the horizontal. I'm going to set the vertical this time to 1,000 pixels. I'm going to click Copy. Now I'm going to create a rectangular size of the art board, 1000, pixels by 1,000 pixels. It has got my old fill on it and you won't have that fill. So I'm just going to press D to select the default colors so that just defaults to white fill black stroke. I'm going to center it over the top of the art board. With it selected, choose, Object, Arrange, Send to Back. It's behind everything now. I'm also going to, again, because it's still selected, click to fill it and stroke it with nothing. It's really vital that it has no fill and no strokes. Here it is, here. I'm going to select everything that's on this lab, not selecting the background, but just everything else. Five shapes and my no fill, no stroke rectangle. Going to the selection tool and I'm just going to drag and drop this into the swatches panel. That is now created as my pattern, so I can get rid of everything here. I'm going to get rid of everything except one element. Going to make a rectangular size of the art board. I'm going to center it on the art board. This second pattern here is the one that we just created. I'm going to click to apply it to the shape and it got applied to the stroke. I'm just going to flip this to apply it to the fill. Now I'm going to choose Object, Transform, Scale. I don't want to transform the objects, but I do want to transform the pattern. Here it is, 50 percent and I'll click "Okay." If you're using Illustrator CS5, CS4 or an earlier version, that's how you would create your shape as a pattern in Illustrator. Now that we've done that, we're ready in the next video to see how we could create our own Mandala from scratch using our template. 6. Pt 5 - Draw a mandala from scratch: Let's see now how we can create a Mandala of our own. I've got the ellipse in place here. I'm just going to remove it because I don't need it. So I'm going to select it and press delete. I also have this overlay showing where to draw visible but locked down. So I'm going to show you how to draw some of the shapes that you might want to learn how to draw to create your Mandala. So I'm just zooming in here. I'm going to flip my stroke and fill. I'm going to make sure I'm working with black. I'm going to use the pen tool here, but this is very simple. What you're going to do is just click on this path where it intersects, and draw a practically horizontal line just a little bit, not horizontal, little bit down. Then click and drag again on this line to create something that looks a little bit circular. I'm going to press escape to stop the pentral drawing, I'm going to select the direct selection tool, which you can also get to by pressing the letter A. Just target each of these points in turn and just adjust them so that I get something that approximates a circle around my shape. Now you can spend a little bit more time getting the perfect circle at this point. I'm just going to continue on. Then select over this line. I'm going to the appearance panel which has just disappeared on me, so I'm going to choose window and then appearance. With it selected, I'm going to increase the stroke weight so that I have quite a thick line. I'm going to actually use about 20 points for my line. You can see that line is cracking up a little bit because my line isn't as good as it could be. But I'm going to click on the stroke here, and if I go to projecting cap, that's going to solve the gap in the middle of the line. I want this line to be black and white with some dashes. With it still selected, I'm going to add a second stroke to it. I'm going to make that stroke white, so that effectively blocks out the black stroke underneath, because they're both the same width at this stage. I'm going to just decrease this to about 15 or 14. Now I want to have dashes here, so I'm going to open up the stroke panel here, and I'm going to turn caps to butt cap, that's really important. Otherwise these dashes aren't going to work. Then I'm going to click on "Dashed Line". I'm going to increase my dash value and I can also work on my gap. You can work between the value of your gap and the value of your dash until you get what you like. Then you'll probably want to select this option here to get everything to line up neatly. I'm just going to click away from this. I think if I just did a little bit more work on these endpoints, I would get a slightly better result. But I'm going to just select this line and I'm going to do edit copy and then edit paste in place so I get a second version of it. This one I'm just going to set to the default settings, so I'm going to press the letter D. So it's set back to a black line with a white fill. Well, I don't want the white fill, so I'm just going to turn that off. It's selected. You can say that the line with no attributes on it except for the black line is selected here in the last panel. I'm just going to press the down arrow key to start moving it downwards. I want to make this into a series of circles, but I want them to stretch all the way across the shapes. I'm going to hold the alt key, if I just drag this shape out. So it intersects the area that we're drawing in. So again, with the selection tool, I'm going to select this and I'm going to make this into dots. I'm going to open up the stroke panel, I'm going to increase the stroke width to about 17. I'm going to make the caps round and I'm going to choose dashed line. I'm going to decrease my dash to zero and increase my gap. Now if you're not sure which way this go, just experiment with them. One of these is going to have to be zero and the other one's going to be something. I'm just going to set that to that value there. I'm going to take this line again, I'm going to do edit copy, edit paste in place. With this second version selected, I'm going to turn the fill to white or the stroke to white. So I've got white dots on top of black dots. But if I just decrease size, I'm going to get this look here. So we've got a couple of elements for our Mandala. Let's have a look and see how we could create some leaves for it. I'm going to zoom in here, I'm going to the pen tool again, and this is a pretty easy pen tool process. What you're going to do is click on this part here, looking at the intersection of the pen tool with this path and you're just going to click and drag downwards and do a pretty hefty drag downwards. Now you're going to go and pick up the middle here. We've got smart guides and they're going to pick up the middle of the document. So once you see that, you're going to click and drag downwards. If you add the shift key, you're going to drag in a perfectly vertical direction. So right now, if the left mouse button press down and the shift key press down. I'm going to add the alt or option key to it it as I swing this handle around. Once at there, I'm going to let go the left mouse button and then the shift and the alt or option keys. Now I'm going back looking for this position, the exact opposite of the original pen line, and I'm going to click and drag back up the line here. That's created my lays shapes. I'm going to press escape to stop the pen tool from drawing. Going to make sure that I have the shape selected, and I'm just going to press the letter D to go back to the default colors. I'm going to turn the fill off because I don't want to fill on this. So at this point, we can have a look at our line and see if it's looking good. Yes, it is, it's looking fantastic. So I'm going to select it and just make it a little bit thicker line. There's a round cap on the end of the line. So I'm going to select the line again, I'm going to choose edit copy, edit paste in place. I'm going to press shift and down arrow to move it down. I'm going to hold the alt or option key to stretch it out. So it's now going to stretch again back to the line that it came from. I'll zoom in on each end and I'm going to just pick up this point here, and I'm just going to drag it down so it intersects with the original path. I get a staggered leaf shape and I'm going to do it over here as well. Just pick it up and just go and move that anchor point. It's giving me this nested leaf shape. Now let's have a look at some dots. I'm going to select the blob brush, and I'm going to make sure that the stroke is black. I'm going to zoom into the area that I want to work in. With the blob brush tool, I'm going to use the open and close square bracket keys to change the size of the brush. So the closed square bracket key is going to give me a larger brush. So I'm going to click once to put down one stroke. Now I'm going to decrease the size of the brush just by hitting the open square bracket key once. We're going to continue to do that all the way across so that each brushstroke is one bit smaller than the one before. So once these strokes are all completed, I'm going to select them here in the last palette. So I'm just control or command clicking on each of them in turn so that they're all selected. I'm going to click the selection tool, then I'm going to click the reflect tool, and it shares a toolbar position with the rotate tool. So with the reflect tool selected, I'm now going to pick the point at which I want to reflect across. So a point about here, I'm going to hold the alt or option key and just click once. I'm going to select vertical and I'm going to click copy. That just rotates across that selected point. So sometimes that's an easier way of reflecting a shape. Control zero to zoom back out. 7. Pt 6 - Finishing Touches Project and Wrap up: Now at this point you should have pretty much the tools that you need to go ahead and to create your Mandela. I'm going to add a few extra elements, but I'm going to stop talking and I'm going to speed the video up as I complete my Mandela. At this stage, I'm going to call that good for my Mandela, so I would go ahead and save it. Then if I wanted to make a pattern from it, you've already seen in the previous video how you could create a pattern from your Mandela. Your project for this class will be to create a Mandela of your own, create the template to use, and then create a Mandela either from scratch like I've done here, or use some of the flourishes that you can find free online. Post an image of your completed Mandela as your class project. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned things about Illustrator that you didn't before. As you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt to recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, say yes, that you would recommend it to others. If you like, write a few words about why you enjoy the class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions. I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon. 8. Bonus video problem with Illustrator CC 2019 and CC 2020: Hello there, this is an additional video for this class, because there is an issue with Illustrator CC 2019 and 2020. Presumably, as they release 2021, it's going to be with the exact same problem. The issue is that Adobe broke Illustrator CC 2019 and 2020. So when you try and follow the instructions in Part 5 of this video to expand things, it's simply not going to work. Now, Adobe has acknowledged that, that's a problem, but they haven't fixed it yet. So this is what you're going to do. If you're using Adobe Illustrator 2019 or 2020, you could go back and use 2018 or 2017. If you've got those still installed on your computer, the easiest possible solution to this problem is to save this document, and then go and open it in those older versions, and then Part 5 of this video is going to work just perfectly. If you don't have those earlier versions or one of those earlier versions, and if you don't want to go ahead and install it on your computer, then this is what you're going to do. When we go here to layer 3, if I unlock this item here, this triangle shape clipping mask, and select over this, you'll see that object Expand Appearance isn't available. So what we're going to do is to do this. First of all, we're going to the don't draw outside me, and we're just going to turn that off because we don't want to say that, and we're going to layer 2. We're going to drag layer 2 all the way outside the current layer 3. You can see at the moment, it's embedded inside layer 1. The reason for this is when we select layer 2, we can also not select expand appearance, so we need to get it somewhere where we can. So we're going to drag it out of here, and put it just above layer 4. Now, with this layer 2 selected, let me just make sure I've only got layer 2 selected. When I go to object, you'll see Expand Appearance is available. It's also curiously, probably the only time that you're ever going to see Expand, and Expand Appearance available at the same time. This is really unusual to say. So what we're going to do, is we're going to choose Expand Appearance, and that's going to expand this out, so that when we open up this layer, we're going to have a whole heap of groups of objects, and that's exactly what we need. Now, we're going to pick up layer 2, and if you need to, you can just drag it back inside layer 1 where it came from, but you don't actually need to do that. If you're going to create a pattern, you can just get rid of everything else. I'm going to get rid of layer 1 contents, except for the area that I'm actually working in the background here. I'm going to get rid of layer 4 because I don't need that. I can go and do whatever I like with my background, including trashing it entirely if you don't want it, and then you have this layer that just has your mandala on it, and you can go ahead and create your pattern. I'm just going to hide my art board with view hide art boards, it's just a bit easier for me to do that. Let's just scale this down so it's quite a bit smaller. I can go ahead quickly and make a pattern from it, selected "Object", "Pattern", and then" Make" click "Okay". Let's go and turn it into a Hex by column, for example. Let's bring in these values here, much smaller. Maybe even to about 300th of the size object that I have, and I'll just click "Done". That gives me this pattern here in the swatches dialogue. That's a way of getting around the problems associated with working in Adobe Illustrator CC 2019 and 2020, and I think it's probably going to continue to be a problem into the future. I hope this helps. If you've got any questions, please don't hesitate to ask.