Repeat Patterns for Beginners: Using Shapes in Adobe Illustrator

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Have you always dreamed of designing your own fabric, but feel like you just can't draw? Hi, I'm Tammy de Zilva and I'm a surface designer based in Brisbane, Australia. I spent many years dreaming of becoming a designer, but my inability to draw always held me back. I later learned several methods to create designs without needing to draw in a traditional sense. I'm now working in my dream job as a surface designer. I have licensed my designs to businesses as well as selling products with my designs on them. I've met many people who have been in the same position as me. I'm here to tell you too you don't need to be an amazing drawer to become an amazing designer. In this class, I'm going to share one of my favorite methods with you using Adobe Illustrator. I'll go over the basics and teach you how to create digital elements using shapes. You will then use those to create your very own repeat pattern. I have a special bonus lesson at the end too where I share with you how I lay out my files to print on fabric for details. This class is suitable for beginners who have been dreaming about designing but lack the confidence in drawing just like I used to. All you need is Adobe Illustrator and your computer. If you don't have Adobe Illustrator, follow along with me and see how easy it can be. At the end of this class, you will gain the confidence to create elements which can be put together to create your very own pattern design for fabric and much more. Let's dive in. 2. Class Project: For the class project, I'm going to guide you through nine lessons that will take you through learning the basic setup of Adobe Illustrator, learning all about shapes and how to create and manipulate them through to creating your very own repeat pattern. We will be using shapes for the entire design, so no drawing is required. Once you've got a pattern, why not join me for a bonus project where we take our pattern and apply it to a detailed template that I've provided you with, which you can find in the Projects and Resources tab of this class. This template is laid out with four panels, which when printed on fabric, will be ready for you to cut and sew into for details featuring your fabulous design. Before starting, I want you to free yourself of any limiting beliefs and enjoy the process of playing, exploring, and learning. The more you take the time to understand each lesson and practice, the more it will become second nature to you. Feel free to follow along with me in the lessons and create the same artwork in order to learn. Please keep in mind that any artwork made with my motifs is purely for learning purposes and isn't being used for anything further, such as printing onto products or fabric. Posting on social media is fine, as long as appropriate credit is given to me. In the next lesson, where we'll be talking about finding inspiration. Why want to create your artwork based on the inspiration you find and feature your own original work? Post your projects on the class page so you can get feedback from the class and me. Be sure to give someone else's projects and love too. If you personal social media, here's the #shapeswithloopla. [MUSIC] 3. Finding Inspiration: At first I want to talk to you about finding inspiration. We're surrounded by shapes everywhere we look whether it's clouds in the sky, architecture, everyday objects or shadows. My favorite inspiration source is shadows and the different shapes that get created depending on the position of the sun. I also love looking at shapes in everyday objects. Have a look at what shapes you can see in them and how they are overlapping or intertwined. We need to be mindful that we are looking for inspiration and not copying someone else's work. Use it as a trigger for thinking of different ways to utilize those shapes. For example, how will that circle and those lines look together in different layouts? Also look at the shapes that together make an object and think about how you could play with those shapes in different ways. Once you get in the habit of looking for inspiration in shapes, you'll start to notice them more and more. Given we all have our phones with us most of the time, it's so easy to quickly capture a photo of any inspiration we see in day-to-day life. I have an album on my phone and add an inspirational photos to that album so I can go and look there when I need ideas. My first task for you is to take some photos of shapes that inspire you, perhaps around your home, in the city, or go for a walk around your neighborhood. Feel free to upload and inspirational photo as part of your project. Most importantly, relax and have fun. 4. Basic Setup For Adobe Illustrator: In this lesson, I'm going to give you a very high-level overview of the Illustrator workspace, and I'll walk you through how I like to set mine up. We'll cover creating a new document, customizing our workspace, saving our workspace, and explaining the layout. I'm working on a Mac, but the interface is almost exactly the same if you're on a PC. The main difference is keyboard shortcuts. The Command key on a Mac is the same as the Control key on a PC. For example, Command F is for find on a Mac, on a PC, it's Control F. The Option key on a Mac is the same as the Alt key on a PC. Let's open up Illustrator and get started. First, you will see the home screen where we can define the file we are wanting to create. We can define the size of the artwork we want to create and set the color profile. These settings can easily be changed later, so don't worry too much. Let's start by creating a new document by clicking New file. There are a bunch of presets available as you can see, but let's go ahead and create a custom size. I like to work in millimeters as it's a measurement I'm familiar with. But feel free to pick a measurement that you're familiar with. I'm going to create a 300-millimeter by 200-millimeter artboard within my document, in CMYK, color profile, and 300 PPI. Click ''Create.'' This is our workspace. Illustrator comes with a set of preset workspaces you can pick from depending on the type of work you are doing. We can see these by going to Window, Workspace. The default is Essentials. Let's stick with Essentials and then customize it to suit what we need. We will save our workspace at the end in case we ever mess up our workspace accidentally and need to get our workspace back to how we like it easily. This is our document window, which displays the file that you're working on. You can have multiple documents open at once and they will be tabbed at the top here. On the left, we can see the toolbar where you can access a variety of tools to use while working. Most of these can also be accessed via a shortcut key. If you hover over a tool, you will see the name of it and the shortcut key at the end. By default, the basic toolbar is shown, but we're going to change it to the Advanced Toolbar. Let's go to Window, Toolbars, Advanced. You can see a little arrow at the top here. If you click the arrows at the top, you can toggle the layout between single and double-column. Next, we're going to add the control bar. We go Window, Control. This will give us shortcuts specific to what we have selected at that moment in time. We're now going to customize the panels on the right. We can see the Essentials workspace has given us three panels already: Properties, Layers, and Library. In the Properties panel, you can see some of the settings that we set when creating our document, and this is an easy place to change any of those if need be. We're going to add some more panels that will help us while we're working. We can toggle what panels we can see via the Window menu. We can see here that Properties has a tick beside it since we already have it open. For this class, we are also going to add a few more. Let's start with color. We click on Color and it will then open in our workspace. To get it docked on the side, we click on the top of the panel and drag it over to the right. If you click on a tab rather than the top of the whole panel, it will just drag the tab over on its own instead. If we drag the set over the word properties, we will see that a blue rectangle appears. If we let this go, it will add the color tabs next to Library. But if we drag it to the top, we will see a thicker blue line and it will add it above Properties like this. We're going to do the same now for swatches. Windows, Swatches. I like to have it under the Color panel. If you hover your mouse over the divider between the two panels, you can make them bigger and smaller to suit. Next, we'll add Stroke, and we'll put that at the very bottom. The final one is a line, which I'm going to add in with the Stroke panel. You can also arrange the tabs within that section by dragging and dropping them as you'd like to. Now we've got our workspace nicely set up. Let's go ahead and save it. We'll go Window, Workspace, New Workspace, and we'll give it a name. I'm going to call mine Skillshare, and click ''Okay.' If we go back to Window, Workspace, we can see this Skillshare workspace we just created is selected now instead of Essentials, and we can revert back to this workspace setup if we ever need to. I'm also quickly going to point out that the status bar here at the bottom of the workspace, the most useful information for us in this class will be the current zoom level, which is handy when we're thinking about the scale of our design and also the tool currently in use. Go ahead and create your own Illustrator file. Set up and save your workspace. I'll see you in the next lesson. 5. Exploring and Creating Shapes: In this lesson, we're going to go through creating basic shapes using the shape tools, and then learn how to color them. We've got our newly setup workspace from the last lesson. Let's go to the toolbar and start using the tools. If we click on this rectangle shape in the Toolbar panel and hover over it, we can see that it's the rectangle tool. We can either click on this tool or use the shortcut key M to create a rectangle. You can see that our mouse pointer has changed to a cross here. If we hold and drag our mouse, this will create a rectangle. If we were to create another rectangle, but this time hold down the Shift key at the same time, it will create a square. If we have a specific size we want to create a rectangle, we could also click in our workspace, and then enter the exact dimensions that we're after. Let's create a 50 millimeter by 70 millimeter rectangle. If we're not sure which tool we currently have in use, remember we can look at the status bar at the bottom of the workspace and see what rectangle is in use. We can also look in the toolbar and the background behind the rectangle tool has a darker background. To get out of rectangle mode, we can click on the Selection tool here in the toolbar by clicking here or using the shortcut key V. Now we can see in our status bar that it's been updated to selection. Before we move on to other shapes, let's talk about color. We can give our shapes a stroke and a fill color. We can set color via the Color or Swatches panel, which you can see here on the right. Now, this outline square represents the stroke color and the filled in square represents the fill color. In order to set these colors for an existing object, we firstly have to select it via the Selection tool, which we already did in the last step. Now let's click the Stroke, and then click the color that you want to set it to, either via a swatch in the Swatches panel, or picking a color from the color spectrum. If you pick a color from the color spectrum, you can then drag that color to the Swatches panel so you can access it again in your document. You could also amend a color by the CMYK values using the sliders in the Color panel. We can now do the same for the fill color if we wanted to set one. If we don't want to set a fill or stroke color, we simply click no fill, no stroke value instead. Now we know how to color our shape. Let's go back to the other shape tools available. If we look at the tools in the toolbar, we can see many of them have a small triangle in the bottom right. This indicates that there is a nested group of tools. If we click and hold down, it will show a flyout menu. We can now see the Rounded Rectangle Tool, Ellipse Tool, Polygon Tool, and Star Tool. Let's select the Ellipse Tool next. Similar to the rectangle tool, we hold and drag our mouse to create the ellipse to the size and shape that we desire. If we want to create a perfect circle, we again hold down the Shift key while dragging the mouse. Since we last used the ellipse tool, we can see it says Ellipse in the status bar. Also in the toolbar, the ellipse tool shows on top now. If we click and hold again, we can then access the other shape tools. Let's try the polygon tool this time. By default, when we click and drag with the polygon tool, it will create a hexagon where we have six sides. You can increase the number of sides by clicking the up arrow while you're holding down the mouse, or to decrease the number of sides, click the down arrow. Alternatively, you can click in your workspace to create a polygon with a specific number of sides and length of each side. A star tool works in a similar way to the polygon and that you can pick the number of sides and the length of the sides as well. Let's try the rounded rectangle tool. This works similar to the rectangle tool but with the addition of having rounded corners. Similar to how we change the number of sides for a polygon or star, we can use the up or down arrows to increase or decrease the roundness of the corners. We can also click in the workspace to set a specific width, height, and corner radius. You can see there are quite a few different shapes we can create with the shape tools. Your task now is to create at least one of each shape. Play with holding down the Shift key to keep them in proportion and use the up and down arrows to change the number of sides or the radius as appropriate. 6. Rotate, Reflect and Resize: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we're going to learn how to rotate, reflect, and resize our shapes, plus how to duplicate a shape. We're going to use the shapes we created in the last lesson. If you'd like to follow along with me, you can find my working file in the Resources section. I firstly want to show you how easy it is to duplicate a shape. If you select a shape and then hold down the Option key for Mac or Alt key for PC while you drag, it will create a duplicate of that shape. Don't let go of the Option or Alt key until you let go with your mouse, as it will just move the original shape instead of duplicating it. Let's play with the rotate and reflect tools. In the toolbar, the rotate and reflect tools are nested together. We can also use these tools via their shortcut key, which you can see here in the flyout menu as R for rotate and O for reflect. To use the rotate tool, first, we need to click on the shape we want to rotate using the selection tool. Next, we want to double-click on the rotate tool, and we can enter the angle we want to rotate it by or use the up and down arrows. The blue dot in the middle is the reference point, which by default is the center of the shape. If you want to change the reference from being in the center, instead of double-clicking on the rotate tool, single-click it. Then you can click on your artboard to the position you want to rotate it from, so let's pick here. To then bring up the rotate panel using that reference point, hover over this blue dot and hold down the Option key for Mac or Alt key for PC. You can then see four small dots appear when you do that. Then click again. You can then set the rotation angle as required. Here we can see it's rotating from this new point rather than the center. Another method which I often like to use is selecting the shape, and then if we hover the mouse around one of the corners, we will see a double arrow appear. When that double arrow appears, hold down your mouse and then drag your mouse around so that the shape moves. You will see the degree of rotation showing as you rotate it. If you hold down the Shift key while doing this, it will rotate it in even 45 degrees segments based off the center. Next, we're going to look at the reflect tool. We can reflect the shape horizontally or vertically. Let's firstly click on a shape with the selection tool. Next, we'll select the reflect tool, and double-click on the reflect tool. As you can see, the shape has reflected to the other side. We can toggle our view by the preview to see the change before and after. If we were to reflect a straight square in comparison or a circle, it won't look any different as they are the same dimensions, top and bottom, and left and right. Let's talk about resizing. I'll go through three ways that you can resize in this lesson. Firstly, you can select the object using the selection tool. We can then see a blue box appearing around the shape, this is called a bounding box. If we hover over one of the sides, you will then see a double arrow appear, which will allow us to drag the shape out to make it larger or smaller. When resizing, if you want to keep the proportions the same as they currently are, you need to hold down the Shift key while you resize. You can also use the scale tool, which has the keyboard shortcut S. You click, hold and drag your mouse to change the scale. Similarly to the rotate tool, it has a reference point from which you can scale from. If you wish to change the reference point, click where you want it to be before dragging. The third option is entering an exact width and height for the shape. Once you've selected it, you can see the options in the control bar. If your Illustrator window is not open wide enough, you might instead see the word transform. If you click on "Transform", you will then get the options. We've covered a few actions in this lesson: rotating with the rotate tool or via the bounding box and changing the rotation point, the reflect tool, the scale tool or resizing via the bounding box, and duplicating a shape using the option key. [MUSIC] 7. Combining Shapes Together: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we're going to start looking at combining shapes together. I'll introduce you to the layers panel, grouping objects, and finally, saving our file. If you'd like to follow along with me, you should've downloaded the sample file from the resources section, before we start. Far we've learned how to use the shape tools, plus rotate, reflect, re-size, and duplicate. On the left-hand side of our art board, you can see that I've created a series of shapes using the shape tools, which we've already learned. On the right-hand side is what we're going to create with these shapes using rotate, reflect, re-size, and duplicate, as we learned in the last lesson. Let's dive in. We'll start with the bow tie. Firstly, let's duplicate the triangle. We're holding down the "Option key", and dragging onto our art board. As you can see, this bow tie is two of the triangles rotated. We've got our first triangle here. We hover our mouse over the corner, hold down the Shift key, and drag down twice. Now we've created the left-hand side of the bow, we need to create the right-hand side. Let's use the reflect tool. We double-click on the reflect tool, and as you can see by default, it's reflected it on the right-hand side using the vertical reflection. This time instead, we want to select "Copy", and as you can see, it's created a second copy of our shape. We'll now select that copy, and drag it across to make the middle. If we hold down the Shift key while we're dragging, it will drag it on a straight line and let go. We have our first shape. Next we'll go ahead and create the butterfly. We could say that the top part of the wings created using this fatter oval, and the bottom part is created using this slimmer oval, the body and the head. Let's duplicate the shapes that we need. First off, we're going to rotate. We'll hold the corner down till we get that double arrow, and then drag it till it's at that angle we're after. We'll now take the bottom wing, and do the same thing, we'll rotate upwards. We'll then drag those up together to align them up. Next, we're going to copy both of these. Now, we can do that by selecting them. If we hold our mouse and drag over the two of them, we can see that they're both now selected, and we want to reflect those over to the right-hand side of the butterfly. We click on our reflect tool. Vertical reflection is already selected, and we select copy. Now, while just the right-hand side is selected, we'll go back to our selection tool, and drag those over. Holding down the Shift key to keep it in alignment. You can then drag the body over, followed by the head. Maybe we'll bring that down just a smidge. There we have a butterfly. Next, we'll create the flower. Now we can see here this shape has been rotated around 24 times. We've got a circle in the middle, and we've got our stem. Let's start by dragging over the center of our circle. Next we'll drag over the first of our petals. We'll place that one roughly in the center. Now, this time we're wanting to go back to the rotate tool, and we're wanting to change the point of rotation. As you can see at the moment, this is in the middle of our petal. We actually want to make it in the middle of our circle. Click in the center here. Hold down our Option key, and now we can see there's four little dots at the bottom, and we'll click again. We know that a circle is 360 degrees, and we want to rotate the petal 24 times. A nifty little trick is to go 360 divided by 24, and this will give us an even distribution around the circle. We click on "Copy", and we can duplicate this function by selecting "Command D". We'll keep doing this all the way around, and we've got our complete circle. We go back to the selection tool, hold down our "Option key", drag over the stem. Now, the sizing is a little bit different here, let's bring it down. We also need a petal for the leaf. Let's also drag that one over. Now, we're going to rotate that one. Again, as this one's a bit smaller, the double arrows aren't quite coming up for us at this zoomed in level. Let's go use the rotate tool. We'll adjust it till we get to the angle that we're after. Go back to our selection tool, and now we want to resize that. Then we'll drag it over. As you can see in this example, we've got the stem coming directly out of a petal. But it looks a bit better how I've got it on the example on the side here where it's coming out in-between. Let's have a go at grouping our objects together. As we did before when we selected two objects, we've got our selection tool on. As we can see again, from the status bar down here, and we're holding down our mouse around these petals. All of them have been selected, and the center one, and what we can now do is rotate those slightly. Now we just need to adjust the size of our stem to suit accordingly. There we have it. We've got a flower, a butterfly, and a bow tie. Now that we've drawn a number of shapes, I also want to quickly introduce you to the layers panel. If we head over to the right side here , click on "Layers". We can actually drag this out so that we can see all of the layers in there. Every single one of these shapes is shown here in our layers panel, and that's looking pretty messy at the moment, having them all together. Just like we selected everything before, we can group items together. Let's select this whole flower with our selection tool, holding and dragging down. You can see that these items have all been selected here, where it's got the blue. If we now hit "Command G", that's grouped everything together. We can do the same for our other shapes. We highlight over the bar, and "Command G". Again, we can see that bow here, and again, for the butterfly. You can see these are the examples I created, in the template, plus the shapes we've got on the left-hand side. If you click this arrow, you can see that the same shapes are still there. At any point if you want to ungroup, it's Command Shift J, and the items become ungrouped. But we can group again. Let's save our file so we can continue to use these shapes in the next lesson. We'll go File. We can either save the same version, or if you want to keep the template for another time, we can go File, Save As. I'll just save that to my desktop, and Okay. We've played with combining shapes, we've explored the layers panel, before finally saving our document. You can see that combining really simple shapes can create something quite cool really easily. Your next task is to further explore these tools, and get creative combining shapes together. [MUSIC] 8. Creating Custom Shapes: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we're going to go through some techniques to customize the shapes we created in the last lesson. We'll learn about anchor points, paths, the direct selection tool, and the shape builder tool. In the last lesson, we played with combining shapes and explored the layers panel before finally saving your document. We're going to take these shapes and customize them even further. Firstly, let's talk about another selection tool, the direct selection tool. This can be found next to the selection tool in the toolbar. It has a white arrow in comparison and the keyboard shortcut is A. A direct selection tool is useful for us to adjust a specific part of our shape. Before we dive in, let's zoom in so we can adjust it in more detail. We can do this by pressing the shortcut key Command Plus to zoom in, or to zoom out, Command Minus. As we change our zoom level, we can see it changing in our status bar at the bottom. You can also double-click there to change the zoom level as well instead. [NOISE] We're going to be working with the butterfly in this lesson, so let's move across the artboard by holding down the space bar and moving our mouse towards the right. You can see the cursor change to a hand symbol when we do this. [NOISE] Let's click the butterfly using the direct selection tool so we can look at what makes up the shape. Here we can see some blue squares around the edge of our shape. These small blue squares are known as anchor points. Between two anchor points is known as a segment. All the segments together for this shape make up a path. A shape has a closed path, whereas a line is an open path with two ends. If we click on one of these anchor points using the direct selection tool, it will allow us to move the anchor point. But we can also see these two handles as well on either side. The handles allow us to manipulate the segment on either side of the anchor point, and we can also extend the length of the handles. A handy shortcut to remember is Command Z for undo or Control Z for PC, which you're likely familiar with in other programs. I'll undo the changes I just made using this shortcut, and we will then duplicate the butterfly before we continue playing with it. [NOISE] Zoom back out. Use the selection tool. Give this one over with holding down our Option key, we'll create a duplicate. Let's zoom back in. Let's compare what happens when we select the butterfly with the selection tool firstly. As this butterfly is a group of shapes, when we select it, all the shapes are selected. We can see the bounding box here. Let's click to the side of our artboard so nothing is selected and then change to the direct selection tool. When we click on the butterfly, just the shape that we have clicked on is selected, and we can then see the anchor points for that shape only despite it being grouped. Next, I'm going to introduce you to the shape builder tool. Firstly, let's select the whole butterfly with the selection tool. Then we can access the shape builder tool via the toolbar or via the shortcut key Shift M. Whether you're overlapping components of the shapes, it shows the possible new shapes. A great feature of the shape builder tool is that it allows us to break these shapes up by simply clicking on each one. If we have a different swatch color selected, it will also change the color for just that component. If we want to remove one of the shapes, we click the Option key and then click to delete it. We can see that the minus sign appears next to our cursor as well. If we then want to merge some of the turquoise shapes into one, we ensure we have the correct color selected first, and then click and drag the mouse across all of them. If we now look at the layers panel and expand the butterfly group that we just worked on, we can see these new shapes. Let's play with the anchor points and handles to adjust the shape of our butterfly a bit more using the direct selection tool. I want to make the bottom of the butterfly a little bit more rounded. [NOISE] I'll drag out the handles until I'm happy with the shape. I also want to make the butterfly wings a little bit more pointy. I'll drag these handles in and repeat the same on the top wings. [NOISE] There we have a custom butterfly. In this lesson, we learned that lines and shapes are made up of anchor points, segments, and paths. We've played with the direct selection tool which allowed us to move our anchor points and adjust the curve on a segment via the handles. We've had an introduction to the shape builder tool, which allows us to combine shapes by merging or erasing them. Your next task is to experiment combining shapes together. Play with the direct selection tool and anchor points, as well as using the shape builder tool. Why not take a look at the inspirational photos you took earlier and see what shapes you can see in them. Have a go at creating those shapes using the skills you've learned so far. Post your progress in the project gallery. I can't wait to see what you'll create. [MUSIC] 9. Tidying Up Your Shapes: Next we're going to learn about some useful tools to help tidy up at work the smooth tool and align tools. Plus we will also cover how to define custom keyboard shortcuts. In the last lesson, we manipulated the butterfly we created using a group of shapes to make a more custom butterfly design. We learned all about anchor points and paths and how we can adjust them. Sometimes when we move our anchor points and handles the past doesn't have the same smooth finish tool. We could play with the handles and positioning of the anchor points to try and get the path smoother, or we could also play with the smooth tool, which I like to do. Let's create a shape that is really rough, so we can have a play with the smooth tool, will create an ellipse on our art board via the shortcut PL. We're then going to add some extra anchor points to our ellipse via the Add Anchor Point tool or shortcut key plus, which we can find nestled under the pen tool in our toolbox. We can click anywhere along the segments of the shape to add these extra anchor points. If we accidentally click off the segment, we will get this message that we need to add an anchor point onto a segment of a path. I'll just click Okay and try again. Now using the direct selection tool, shortcut. Let's move these anchor points around to make a wonky shape. Now, we'll use the smooth tool to smooth this shape out. The smooth tool is located in the toolbar nested under the shaper tool. If we look at the flayer menu, you can also see that there is no shortcut key assigned to this move tool. As it's a tool I use often, I want to easily be able to access it. Let's go ahead and set up a custom shortcut key. To do this, we go to Edit Keyboard Shortcuts. In search panel, and type in smooth. We click underneath shortcut here, we can enter the shortcut key we want to use, and I'm going to use number 1 for my shortcut. We'll click "Okay". Now, because we're changing the default keyboard shortcut, we need to give our new key sec file a name. Let's just go ahead and give it a name. Now let's start using the smooth tool via a new shortcut key one. We can see that our mass pointer has changed to the circle. What we need to do firstly, we need to select a shaped, actually before we click on the smooth tool. Now we can see all of our anchor points here. We just drag this smooth tool around, and you can see that it changes the number of anchor points and makes the path, so let's move them. The more you zoom in the more detail you can get. Next, we're going to look at the aligned tools. Let's delete this shape of our art board first. We've got it selected and we'll just hit the delete key. Now we're going to create two new shapes, a rectangle by a shortcut key, and a triangle. We can create a triangle via the polygon tool and use the down arrow until we just get three sides. We can drag a mass pointer out to change the rotation and the size of a triangle. Let's move it to the top of the rectangle, with a selection tool. Let's duplicate this. We can look at two different ways of aligning. we'll select both of our shapes, hold down the option key, and drag that over. You want to combine both of these shapes to create an arrow. Let's select both of them and go over to the Align panel on the right-hand side. We can say that we have six options of alignment. Horizontal align left, center, right, vertical align top, center, and bottom. We want to send to rely on the shapes horizontally. Let's click on that one. Now let's move these shapes together. If we hold down the Shift key while we drag our mouse, it will keep it in alignment still. We could make this one shape using the shape builder tool, which was the shortcut key Shift M. But before we do that, let's select the two of them, Shift M, and we can drag between the two. Go back to our selection tool, and we just have one arrow shape now. You might have noticed the shapes move as part of the alignment. Sometimes we will want to do an alignment based on the position of one of the shapes, so it doesn't move. Let's use this other copy we took before. Well, highlight our shapes and go back to the align panel. We can see at the bottom here, we've got three different options for aligning. Aligning by to our art board, aligning to selection, and aligning to a key object. Aligning by selection was the default selected, which we just used when we created a first arrow. This time we're going to use align to key object. We can see that the triangle has a thicker outline to it now. If we were to click one of the align tools, now, it would align the rectangle based on the position of the triangle. Let's change that to make it based off the rectangle. If we hold down the option key and click on the rectangle, we can see that we've got this thicker outline here now. If we go ahead and click horizontal align center again, we can see that it's nicely aligned. we click on art board, click on the selection tool. Start dragging down, holding down the Shift key again. We've now got a perfectly aligned arrow again. In this lesson, we learned about the smooth tool and the aligned tools in the align panel. We also learned how we consider our own custom shortcut keys via edit keyboard shortcuts. Next task is to play with these tools and try setting your own custom keyboard shortcuts. [MUSIC] 10. Creating a Repeat Pattern Tile : [MUSIC] So far we've learned how to create, combine and customize shapes using a variety of tools within Illustrator. Now the most exciting lesson is where we take one of these shapes and create a simple repeat pattern. But what is a repeat pattern? Well, a pattern is a combination of elements, often referred to as motifs, repeated in a recurring and regular arrangement. We're going to be creating a repeat pattern tile, which will be used to make our pattern repeat seamlessly. There are various types of patents you can create, and today we will be creating a simple half drop repeat pattern using the flower we created earlier. If you'd like to follow along with me, you can download my working file from the Resources section or feel free to use one of the shapes you've created so far. In the example I'm showing you today, I'm working with an artboard that is 200 by 200 millimeter in size. These measurements are important to make note of for steps we'll be taking later in this lesson. I'm going to take the flower we created earlier and change the colors to make it more appealing. I've created a color palette that I want to use for this design in the Swatches panel, which you can see over here. Now by default, Illustrator gives us a set of swatches each time we open a new file. But I generally like to delete those and just have my own. If you wanted to delete a swatch, simply click on it and then click on the trash can. Now, before we start coloring, let's first group all of our petals together so that it's easy to color at the group level. Over here in the Layers panel, I've expanded out our flower. I'll click on this first petal. I'll scroll all the way down. Hold down my Shift key, select the last petal and now we've got them all selected. We can group them via the shortcut Command G. I'm going to create the petals in this light color. I like my center in orange, my stem in green, and the leaf also in green. I could say this looks a little bit funny here with the stem on top of the petals here. Let's go ahead and move that behind the petals. If we go over to my Layers panel, click on the stem. You can just drag it down below the petals here. Now we're done coloring. Let's collapse the group in our layers and go ahead and create our pattern tile. In order to create a seamless repeat pattern tile, we're going to put our shape overlapping on the edges of our artboard. We want to make that same shape match over the other side, both top and bottom. Let's take our flower and move it to the top corner. I might first just zoom out a little bit. Take my flower to the top corner. Now I want to copy it to the right-hand side. I can do that by using the move command, which I can access via the Object, Transform, Move, or the shortcut key Shift Command M. Remembering that our artboard is 200 by 200 millimeters. We want to go horizontally 200 millimeters. But since we're only copying it to the right, we want zero vertically. We'll select Copy. Now we can see we've got two copies of our flower here. Let's hold down the Shift key and click on the other flower so they're both selected and now we'll repeat that same step to copy it to the bottom. Shift Command M. This time we want to move zero horizontally and 200 vertically. Again, we'll copy. To fill this center space, let's go ahead and copy another flower in the center. To make that exactly in the center, we just simply need to divide our artboard both sides by two. We'll click on this one here. Shift Command M. We want to move it 100 millimeters horizontally as well as 100 millimeters vertically and select Copy. Now we can see that there's a tiny little bit down the bottom here that's overlapping over the edge of our artboard. We also need to move it so that it will repeat seamlessly and be at the top here too. Again, we'll go Shift Command M. This time because we are going upwards, we need to put a minus sign in. We'll go minus 200 and copy. Now you can see that tiny little bit there is overlapping on the edge as well. Now just to add a little bit of difference and balance to our design, let's go ahead and copy these two and make a leaf here reflect over on the other side. Using the Reflect tool, the shortcut key is O, or we can just click over here, double-click on that vertical, and we can see that it's copied it over or moved it over to the other side. Next, we're going to create our background. We want to create a background that is exactly the same size as our artboard, which we know is 200 by 200. We'll use the rectangle keyboard shortcut M, we'll just click anywhere on your artboard and type in 200 by 200. I'm going to make that this nice peach color. First we need to align that to our artboard. If we go over to the Align panel, it's got aligned to artboard selected. We then want to center horizontally, followed by center vertically. Then we want to move the rectangle to the back. We can do this by going Object, Arrange, Send to Back or the shortcut key Shift Command square open bracket. Now the next step is an important one. If we go to the Edit menu, we can see that there are a variety of copying and paste options that we have along with their keyboard shortcuts. We're going to be using Command C for copy and Command B for paste in back. Let's go ahead. Command C to copy our background and Command B to place it in the back. If we head over to our Layers panel, we can say that they're both there and we've got the one at the very bottom selected currently. Now we need to set this layer to have no stroke and no fill color. We can see that it already has no stroke color applied, so let's go ahead, select our fill and set it to none as well. This layer we've just created is called the bounding box. If we don't have this layer at the bottom of our artwork with no stroke and no fill, our pattern will not work. A common problem that people encounter with their patterns when put into repeat is to have a fine white line that appears where the repeats sits. A little trick which seems to get around this problem is by extending our colored background layer beyond the size of our bounding box and our artboard. We can just drag the corners out to do this. Let's select our colored background layer. We'll go to the corner, we get those double arrows and drag it out a little bit. It doesn't matter how much, but just a little bit is enough. Next we're going to select a whole pattern, including the background layer and bounding box. We'll go back to our Selection tool, select everything, and drag and drop it into the swatches panel. Now this has created our pattern swatch. Let's zoom out a little now using Command Minus. He's the most exciting part where we get to see our pattern come to life. Let's go ahead and create a new rectangle using the toolbar or shortcut key M. At the moment you can see it's got this fill color, this peach color, but instead we're going to fill it with our pattern swatch. How cool is that? It's as easy as that. In this lesson we learned how to create a simple seamless repeat pattern tile. We placed our shape in one corner and then copied it over to the other three as per the measurements of our artboard using the Move tool, which was with the shortcut key Shift Command M. We then copied another of our shapes to the center before applying our background color and adding the all-important bounding box with no stroke and no fill color. After dragging our pattern tile to the Swatches panel, we filled our rectangle with our newly created pattern swatch to test it out and see it come to life. Now it's your turn to use the skills we've learned so far and create your very own pattern too. [MUSIC] 11. Exporting Your Pattern: [MUSIC] We've created our repeat pattern tile and tested out how fabulous it looks. We now need to get a print ready pattern tile file to send to the printer. First, we need to think about the style of our pattern and what we want to use it for. If we were designing for a notebook cover, we would want quite a small-scale. If we were designing for wallpaper, we would want it larger. Once we've determined the scale, we can then export our pattern tile ready to send to the printer. Let's look at re-sizing our pattern tile. I find sometimes seeing a design on the screen isn't the same as holding the design physically in my hand. I will often print them out in repeat to get a better idea. Let's go ahead and do that now. As I'm working in metric, I'm going to print on an A4 piece of paper. I'll make a rectangle to these dimensions and then fill it with my pattern. To keep out art board tidy, let's first get rid of our test pattern from before by selecting it and clicking Delete. Now we've got shortcut key M to create a rectangle. Click on our art board and then I'll enter the dimensions, 210 millimeter by 297 millimeter. As the last field we used was our pattern, it's automatically filled the rectangle with it. If that wasn't the case, you can click on the pattern swatch in the swatches panel. I'm going to play with the scale of the pattern that's filled this rectangle before I print it. Personally, I like to sort out my scale this way before I update my pattern tile scale as the process is a lot simpler. We've played with the scale tool for a shape in an earlier lesson. But this time we want to change the scale of the pattern filled within the shape. Let's change back to the selection tool and select our rectangle. We'll then go to Object, Transform and Scale. Well, we can right-click on our rectangle transform scale. We want to untick transform objects as this would scale the rectangle rather than the pattern. We want to ensure that Transform Patterns is ticked. If we have the preview selected, we can then adjust the scale uniformly. Well, I might take it down to 40 percent. I click on Uniform again, and that will now preview that for me. Click Okay. Now to print this rectangle, I find it easier to make it an art board. Let's copy the rectangle, Command C. Pasting back, Command B. Then we can convert this copy into an art board by going Objects, Artboard, Convert to Artboards, or the shortcut key Shift Command 1. If we now go to the artboard tool in our toolbar panel, we can see the art board number in the top left, which in this case is number 2. Now let's go File, Print. We only want to print this one art board. Let's select range, and enter 2. We also want to make sure that scaling is set to do not scale as we want it to print exactly as we've set it up. Let's select Print, and Right we have our own pattern in print. If you wanted to change the scale, you can keep repeating this process until you're happy. Now we've decided on this scale, we then need to update our pattern tile accordingly. Let's select everything in our pattern tile using the selection tool. Then go Object, Transform, Scale. We can then ensure the scaling is uniform, and using the preview option, we can scale up and down easily. Or in this case, we know the exact amount we want to scale down by. Let's just set that to 40. This time we want to transform the object, so let's tick that option again. You can see out art board no longer is the same size as our bounding box, so we need to fix that. Let's click on our background to make it easier to find it in the layers panel, and we can see it here. Allow it. Let's click our bounding box. We'll then go to the artboard tool again via the shortcut key Shift O. We'll then go up to the control bar at the top here. We can select the size to Fit to Selected Art. Now before we come out of the art board tool, let's take note of the art board number for our pattern tile, which we can see here is 1. We're now ready to export our pattern. We will export both our pattern tile and the repeat pattern we printed earlier. We`re going to File, Export, Export As, we'll tick Use Artboards as we set our artwork to perfectly fit them, and we'll select the range. Entering our two art board numbers. You'll need to check with who you're printing your design with on the best file type, PPI, and color profile. For this example, I'm going to select JPEG. Click Export. [NOISE] I'm going to select 150 PPI and RGB color profile. I'm going to embed the profile. If the wrong color profile is selected for your printer, your colors will not print correctly. This is really important. We also need to make sure the anti-aliasing profile is set to art optimized. If we were to set it to top optimize, this will generally create the dreaded white line problem, which we talked about earlier as well. Now we'll click on Okay. [NOISE] We now have a print ready pattern tile as well as our pattern in repeat. In this lesson, we played with changing the scale of our pattern and pattern tile. We then learnt how to print and export our artwork, remembering to set export settings for anti-aliasing profile to art optimize. It's also super important to check with your printer on their exact file requirements before exporting your pattern tile. Your task now is to go ahead and export your repeat pattern and share it in the project gallery. I can't wait to see what you'll create. [MUSIC] 12. BONUS: Print Your Pattern on Fabric for Tea Towels: [MUSIC] In this bonus lesson, I'm going to show you how you can create a print ready file to send to a fabric printer so you can sell your own tea towels. We'll be sitting up and not bored with full panels to fit a yard or a meter of fabric. In the resources section, you can find two tea towels templates, depending if you like to work by the yard or meter. I work in meters, so I'll be working off the meter template in this lesson. I've based the sizing in these templates of the width of Spoon flower's linen, cotton canvas fabric, but you can adjust the width of the art board and panels to suit different fabric widths if need be. The width of linen, cotton canvas is 137 centimeters, so my art board is set to 137 centimeters wide and 100 centimeters long. If we use the Artboard tool, shortcut key, Shift O, we can see in the control bar at the top the dimensions. Let's change back to the selection tool. I then created four rectangles that perfectly fit into this art board. Let's click on one of them, and then click on "Transform" in our control bar. We can see the dimension set here, 68.5 centimeters and 50 centimeters. I also like to print my logo or name onto my tea towels, so I've included a place for you to put yours too. You can see that it's rotated to suit the direction of the tea towel. By printing your logo or name onto the tea towel itself, it saves you having to get branded tags printed and serve them into the hem of the tea towel, which is less cost and less effort. To get our pattern onto the rectangles, we're going to copy our pattern tile into this template file. Let's go back to our pattern tile file. Select the pattern tile, "Command C" to copy, then we'll go back to our tea towel template and Command V to place it. If it pastes on top of the template as it's done here, just drag it off to the side. While we have the pattern tile selected, I want to show you another quick tip which will be useful later. Let's go to the Swatches panel and click the folder icon at the bottom, and click "Okay". This tin added the colors used in our pattern to the Swatches panel. Just like with the logo, we need our pattern tile rotated to suit the orientation of the tea towel. We've got our pattern tile already selected. I will hold down the Shift key and rotate it twice upwards. Now, let's perfectly rotate it 90 degrees. Let's drag our pattern tile into the Swatches panel, then we'll select one of our rectangles. If we look at the Swatches panel, we can see that it has a black stroke. I like to apply a stroke around each panel as it acts as a cutting guide for our fabric later. Let's go ahead and apply a fill using our rotated pattern swatch. We again need to think about the scale of our design, how big or small do we want the flowers to be. For a tea towel, I'd like mine a bit bigger as I quite like a large scale and want them bigger than the sample we printed before. Let's right-click on the rectangle, transform, scale. We want to untick Transform Objects and ensure that transform patterns is ticked. I'm going to bring the scale up at 150 percent, and then click "Okay". Next, we will update our logo. This is optional, so if you don't want your name or logo to be printed on your fabric, you can hide the text via the layers panel, so we'll scroll down here until we find our logos, and we can toggle them on or off. Let's select the logo. Zoom in using Command Plus. [NOISE] Double-click on it, and then we can enter the text that we want to appear. We can set the color to suit using the swatches we added earlier, so we'll change back to the selection tool, and then select a swatch color required. Let's zoom back out again using the shortcut key, Command Minus. Our logo isn't easy to read at the moment, but I'll position the logo to sit nicely in the bottom right of the tea towel, taking into consideration the hem. I don't want to move the logo, but instead will move the pattern. We'll select our rectangle, remembering the shortcut key to move is Command Shift N. We again want to untick transform objects and ensure that transform patterns is ticked, and we can then move the pattern horizontally and vertically. Sometimes Illustrator automatically pre-fill some values to move. We can set them back to zero and play from there. I'm just going to move until I can find a nice gap. Alternatively, you could also add a rectangle behind your logo and not worry about positioning your logo within your pattern. You can go ahead and fill the other rectangles with the same pattern or you could fill them with different patterns and make yourself a variety of tea towels. The choice is yours. I went ahead and ordered myself some fabric with different patterns in the panels as you can see here. Next, we need to export our artboard. We go to File, Export, Export As, tick Use Artboards, but we only have one artboard in this file, so we don't need to set the range. Again, you'll need to check with your fabric printer on the best file type, DPI and color profile. I'm selecting JPEG, and click "Export". Again, from my fabric printer, I need to be 150 PPI RGB color profile, and again, ensuring our anti-aliasing is set to Art Optimized, and click "Okay". We now have a print ready file with full panels in it, ready to send or upload to the fabric printer. I've gone ahead and cut out my full fabric panels and then sum up a tea towel for myself using the design we just made. How great does it look? This bonus lesson, I walked you through how to use my tea towel template. You have a print ready file for four tea towel panels with your logo or name. We learned how to scale and move our repeat pattern that we filled within an object just so at this specific project we are working on. If you create a tea towel too, it showed out a photo in the project gallery. I'm so excited to see your finished product featuring your very own design. [MUSIC] 13. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for watching my lessons and congratulations for creating your very own repeat pattern. I've shed a lot of information with you. Remember to take things slow, watch, and rewatch the lesson until you get it before moving on to the next one. Practice, Practice, and more. Practice is the key for it to all sync in. We've covered the very basics in getting started with Adobe Illustrator, with setting workspace, learning about the various tools in order to create and manipulate shapes, and how to create a repeat pattern tile. I hope you enjoy the bonus lesson where I shared how to use my tail template so you can print your own fabric with four tail panels using your own design. There are often multiple ways you can do the same thing in Adobe Illustrator. In this class, I've shared you some of the ways you can work, but feel free to further investigate other methods yourself. I hope you've enjoyed following along and feeling more confident in designing without drawing. Be sure to post your pattern in the project gallery. All enjoy your fabulous artwork. Feel free to ask me questions in the discussion section if you'd like to find out when I release any future Skillshare classes, you can follow me here on Skill Share by clicking the Follow button beside my name. Feel free to leave a review and let me know if you enjoy this class. You can follow me on Instagram or Facebook at Louplad Designs to keep up to date with what I'm up to or sign up for my monthly newsletter. Thanks again and I'll see you next time. 14. Need more?: Hey, friends, are you feeling stuck or need some fresh insights to tackle a challenge in your creative business? I'm offering one on one sessions through Skillshare. Why not join me for a focused call where we'll dive deep into your specific challenge. I have experience in art licensing, director customer sales, and wholesale, markets or craft fairs depending on where you're based, in person and online workshops and more. Or maybe you need technical assistance with creating repeat patterns in Adobe Illustrator or Procreate. We'll work together to break down your challenge and brainstorm practical solutions tailored to your needs. No fluff, just actionable advise. To book in, you'll find the link below or head over to my profile page. I look forward to working with you soon.