Transcripts
1. Intro: Hello there. My name is Ana and I am a surface designer from Umea, Sweden. I love to make patterns and through my company, you select the design. I have license, I sell my artwork to clients all over the world. In this class, I will show you one of my favorite ways to make a floral pattern. We're going to find some flowers and leaves that we like, trace a couple of them, and then use Illustrator to make variations of the motifs and build the pattern. It's a pretty intuitive method that really allows you to play with the motifs when building your design. Don't worry if you feel like you can't draw flowers or anything else in that matter. For this class, you really don't have to be good at drawing at all. Here are some examples of patterns I built using this method. For this class, I will be working in Adobe Illustrator, and to be able to follow along, it's good if you have a basic understanding of the program. I would say it's great if you at least know how to select, resize, and rotate an object. If you're totally new to the program, that's fine but I would recommend that you take an introduction course before so that you feel really prepared. Your project for this class is to create a floral pattern of your choice with the help of the method I'm showing you. All right. Let's get into the class.
2. Flower And Leaves: Start by finding some flowers and leaves that you like and think would make a nice combination. Remember, this is art, so the flowers and leaves really don't have to be from the same plant for you to use them in your pattern. I took a little walk and found these buttercups in a ditch not far from my studio. The leaves are actually from a tree. I'm not sure of the name of the tree, but I felt they would look you together with the buttercups. I took some photos of them with my phone. When you're doing the same thing, try to take photos in a couple of different angles, so you get flowers and leaves in different perspectives and sizes. If you want to use the same photos as me, you can download my photos in the resources section on the class. Let's start drawing.
3. Tracing: Here are the pictures of my flowers and leaves that I printed out. Now I'm going to trace them with the help of my lightbox. I'm drawing with a black fine liner size 03. Don't use a smaller tip on your pencil than that. Since it's going to make it harder to vectorize your motifs in Illustrator later on. I'm using just a regular white printing paper to draw on. I'm starting with my leaves. Try to trace leaves in a couple of different angles and sizes here. In that case, you get more alternatives to work with and it will give your pattern more life in the end. You can of course do this with a tablet or an iPad. But I just loved to work with pen and paper so I'm going to do that this time. You don't have to trace the motifs perfectly here. I actually like it when the lines are a bit wobbly and not that perfect. I think you get a more personal hand-drawn look that way. I'm drawing about 10 leaves and 10 flowers. I think that will be enough. Since I'm going to duplicate these motifs later on and reuse them to make my pattern, I don't need that many. All right, let's speed things up a bit. Now I have 10 leaves and I'm moving on to my flowers. I will go for about 10 pieces here, too and try to get flowers in a couple of different angles and sizes just like I did with my leaves. I'm starting with the seeds in the middle of the flower and drawing the petals afterwards. All right. Now I have about 10 leaves and 10 flowers, that I'm happy about. The last thing I'm going to do is to draw some stems. I will draw this by freehand. It's not that important how they look, they will not be that visible in my pattern. You can draw any kind of stems you like here, curved or winding or straight. I think I'll go for a straight. Since I'm going to reuse these motifs as well, I don't need that many. I think about four will do it. I'm drawing two shorter ones and two little longer ones. I think that will be just enough. All right. That's it for the drawing part. Now I'm going to scan my motifs. If you don't have a scanner, you can just take a picture of your drawing with your phone or any other camera that you have, that will work just fine. The next step is to start preparing our motifs in Illustrator.
4. Prepare Your Motifs: Now it's time to vectorize my drawing in Illustrator. I'm starting by creating a new document. I'm going for the A4 size, RGB Color mode, and 300 ppi. The first thing I'd like to do is to hide my artboard since I'm not going to use it in this case, so I go to "View" and "Hide Artboards". Now I have a blank white background to work with that is easier to see my motifs on. Now I want to find my drawing and import it into Illustrator. I go to "File" and "Place" and navigate to wherever I've saved my scanned drawing. It's right here for me. I'll just mark it and hit "Place", and then I'll just click anywhere on my document to place my image. Now I want to vectorize these motifs so that I can work with them, and to do that, I like to work with the Properties panel. This is a really handy panel to have open, and if you don't see it, you'll find it under "Window" and "Properties". Here in the section Quick Actions, you'll find a tool called Image Trace that helps you to vectorize your artwork. Click on it and choose "Black and White Logo", then Illustrator, will give you a clean black and white results that it's easy to recolor later on. Now Illustrator has vectorized my leaves and flowers, I hit "Expand" and "Ungroup" to release them. I don't need the background to my motifs, so I just select that and hit "Delete" to remove it, and there's a little something that my scanner gave me, that I don't need either, so I'll just delete that as well. Now I have my leaves, flowers, and stems here and the next thing I want to do is to group every object. As you can see, for example, every part of this leaf is loose and I want to be able to handle it as a whole. To do that, I'll select everything that belongs to that motif and hit "Control G". You can also right-click and choose "Group". I'll repeat this procedure for all of my motifs. Next step is to sort the motifs a bit. You don't have to do this, but I think it's so much easier to work with them if my leaves and flowers are structured, and what I will do is just to order my motifs from small to large in a vertical row. When that's done, it's time to make some more motifs to work with and I'm going to duplicate the ones I got. I select my row leaves, drag the selection to the side and before I let go, I hit the "Alt" key, and that will make a copy of the leaves. Lastly, I'm going to flip my new row horizontally. Make sure your row is selected, and then go to your Properties panel and here you see a little button called Flip Horizontally, just click on it and row will be flipped, and just like that, I have twice as many motifs to build my pattern with. I will repeat this procedure with the flowers and stems as well. My stems are actually so few, so I don't have to sort them, I'll just make a copy and flip them. Now I have a nice sorted collection of motifs to work with and the next step is to start building my pattern.
5. Pattern Making: Now it's time to make our pattern. The first thing I want to do is to decide how big my swatch is going to be, and then create a background in that size. I use the rectangle tool, and just click anywhere to get this size box popping up, and I think my pattern will be not so big. I think something like 100 millimeters wide, and maybe 200 high. Let's see how that looks. I want to give it some color too, so I can see it better, and I'll just use one of illustrator's default colors. I'm going to change it later on. That might work, or maybe I want it to be just a little bit wider. If I select my background, I can change the measurements here in the properties panel. I think I go for 150 millimeters wide instead. Yeah, that looks better. I don't want to accidentally change my background when I'm working on it, so I'm going to lock it. With the background selected, I go to Object, and Lock, Selection. Then it's locked and I can't move or change it in any way. Now it's time to start building my pattern. I'll start by making a copy of all of my motives, I'm dragging that copy to the side. In that case, I will always have a backup album so that I can make more copies as I go. Let's start filling our background with some flowers. I always start by placing motives on the upper edge of my swatch. I'm choosing a stem, and that's right. The background needs to be sent to the back before I can place my motives. Otherwise, I won't see anything. So I'll have to go back to Object, and hit Unlock All, and then right-click, Arrange, and Send to Back. Then I lock it again by hitting Control 2. Now I'm going to build my first flower. I choose a stem and a flower, and then it's just to go with the flower really. Adding flowers, and leaves as you like, and you can move around, rotate, and resize both the flowers and the leaves as you go so that they look good. There are really no rules for how to do this. I love this way of building a pattern, it's so creative, and it feels unpredictable, and you can never really tell how the finished pattern will look like before we're done. Try and play around with the arrangement of the motives as well. If the flower or leave should be arranged to the front door, send backwards, see what looks good to you. I'll just keep on filling the upper edge with flowers here. When I have used most of my flowers and leaves, I just delete what I haven't used and make myself a new copy of my backup. By working like this, using up a batch of motives at a time, I get as much as variation as possible in my pattern. Now I'm done with my upper edge. The next step is to copy everything that crosses the edges, both on the left side, and the upper one to the opposite side of my swatch. To do that, I select all of the object that falls outside, right-click, and go to Transform, Move. I want to copy these objects from my upper edge to my bottom, and that means moving the copy the exact length of my swatch. Vertically, my swatch is 200 millimeters, so I'm typing 200 vertically and hit Copy. As you can see, there are some motives overlapping the left edge as well, so I will copy them in the same way, but instead of top to bottom, I'll copy from left to right. I select everything that falls over the edge. Make sure I got everything selected, and then go to Transform and Move. Here I don't want to move anything vertically, just horizontally. So I type in 150 in the horizontal box, since that's the width of my swatch, and hit Copy. Now I'm going to continue to fill my left side with flowers and then copying them in the same way. Now I have filled my left side with flowers, and I'm going to copy everything that falls over the edge to the right side. Since I already have copied some of the motives on my left side, I have to make sure I don't copy those twice. But I'll start by selecting everything that's outside of my left edge, and then I unselect the motives I've already copied. To do that, I'm pressing the "Shift" key, and just clicking on the objects I don't want to copy. Then I go to Transform, Move, and move the objects 150 millimeters vertically. As you can see here, some of my flowers have ended up behind the stem, and I want them to be in front of it, so I have to correct that by right-click, go to Arrange, and Front. Let's see if I need to fix anything else. No, I think that's it. The last step is to fill this empty space in the middle with flowers. Personally, I think this old-fashioned method of building a pattern in Illustrator is easier to work with, than the Pattern Tool. It's a bit less messy, I guess. It's also kinder to your computer since working in the Pattern Tool demands a lot more from your CPU. But you can, of course, use the Pattern Tool to do this if you prefer to work in that. That's it. Now I have filled my swatch with flowers, and next up, I will test my pattern to see how it looks. I'm deleting these flowers, don't need them anymore. To be able to make a pattern out of this, I need to start by unlocking my background, I go to Object, and Unlock All. After that, in order for Illustrator to understand that it is a pattern swatch, I need to make an invisible copy of my background and place it in the very back of all of my motives. I select my gray background rectangle, copy it by hitting Control C and pasting it in the back by hitting Control B. Since this background is going to be invisible, it can't have any fill or stroke, so I make sure that both of them is set to none. If you don't see the swatches panel, you'll find it under Window, and Swatches. Panel, select everything and drag the selection into my swatches panel. There is my pattern swatch. I click on it, then go to the rectangle tool, and make a box filled with my pattern to check it. I think the easiest way to check your pattern is to scale it to a smaller size, right-click, and go to Transform and Scale. Make sure here to uncheck the transform object box so that you only scale your pattern. Then in the uniform box, I type the scale I would like to try, I'll go for 50 percent at first. You can also go back to Transform and Scale, and scroll with your mouse in the uniform box to zoom in and out and see how that looks. Also, make sure that the preview box is checked so that you can see what you're doing. As you can see here, there are some lines appearing in my pattern from the stems, but I don't really mind those actually. We're looking white spaces or motives that make the pattern unbalanced or creates any other shapes or lines that I don't want. But I think this looks pretty good actually. I might want to make one of those leaves a little bit smaller. I'll start by locating the leaf in my swatch, I'll go with that one. There it is, and then I scale it down a bit. I might want to move that flower a little bit too. Then I select my pattern swatch again and drag it into the swatches panel. Now I have two patterns, this is my first one, and this is the new one, let's see how it looks. As you can see it didn't really change the pattern that much, but I think it looks good. You can play around and change your pattern as much as you like in this step, just continue until you're happy with the result.
6. Color: Now it's time to give my patterns some color. I will start by importing my color palette to Illustrator. You can use any colors you like here. If you want to use the same palette as me, you can download this one in the resources section on the Class page. To open my palette, I go to my Swatch Library, this little button here, and then choose "Other Library". Then I locate my color file wherever I'll save it, and open it. To import it to my Swatches panel, I just click on the little folder to the left here on my palette. There it is. Close that one. I'm going to begin by coloring my background. I'm selecting it, and then I'll select a color for my palette. I think I'll go for this light beige one. Next, I want to color my leaves. I select all of them, by holding down the Shift key as I go. Just clicking on every leaf I got. That's all of them. Now to change the color, I head over to Properties and under Quick Actions, I now have a button called Recolor. Click on it to open the Recolor tool. Here, are the colors that I've selected. The black lines and the white fill of my leaves. You can see that I have a small box for the white color, but not for the black one. That's because Illustrator per default, suggests that you don't recolor what's black. If you don't see a small color box for your white color either, you can just click on the empty space there, and Illustrator will ask you if you want to add this color so you can change it. Hit "Yes" here, and the little color box should pop up. But I don't want to change the black so I'm locking it again by clicking on the little arrow, so it becomes just a straight line again. It's just the white I want to change here. To change the white color, I make sure the color is selected. Here, you can change the color in a lot of ways by pulling the sliders down here, for example. But I want to use my color palette. I'm clicking on my palette, and then Illustrator will color my leaves in a random color from the palette. If I want to change the color again, I can do so by working with the sliders to add more pink, or orange, making it darker or lighter. But, I want to try and change the leaves to a random color in my palette. To do that, I will use this little button, Randomly change color order. I think I want my leaves to be green. Yeah, that looks good. I'm hitting "Okay". Illustrator will ask me if I want to save any changes to my color group here, but I don't have to, so I just hit "No" here. The next step is to color my flowers, and I will do that in the same way as with my leaves. I'll start by selecting all of my flowers. Then I go to Quick Actions and recolor. I don't want to recolor the black here either, just the white. I'm clicking on my palette, and trying out a couple of different options. I think I like them in pink actually, I'll go for that. As you can see, the petals and the pistils are all the same color now, but I would actually like the pistils to be another color. To do that, I'll zoom in a bit so you can see. I'll use the Direct Selection Tool here on my toolbar. You can also hit "A" on your keyboard. Since the parts of the flower are grouped together, I can't select the pistils with the Regular Selection Tool. I have to use the direct selection one. I'm selecting the pistils of pink, and make the little leaves under the flowers the same color as well. This part is a bit time-consuming, but it will be worth it in the end. When I've selected the pistils, I'm just re-coloring them by choosing a color from my palette here in the Swatches panel. I'll go for this whitish color, I think. Let's see if I got them all. I think so. Lastly, I want to recolor my stems. I select all of them. Let's see if I got them all. I think so. Then I use the Recolor tool again. As before, I just want to recolor the white. I might go for that brown one. Yeah, that looks good. Now I can check my pattern and see how it looks in color. I select "My repeat" and drag it into the swatches panel and fill my rectangle with my colored pattern. I can go to "Transform and Scale" to zoom in and out. Remember to uncheck "Transform Objects" here, you just zooming in and out on your pattern and scroll to see how it looks. I think that looks pretty neat. What I would like to do now is to give my pattern a little bit more depth by changing the color tone on some of the leaves of flowers. I'm selecting a couple of leaves that I want to be here. If I select the leaf that's falling outside the edge, I have to make sure to select the copy of that leaf to, otherwise just half of the leaf will be recolored. I tried to pick leaves evenly on my repeat that just go for as many as you want here. See what looks good to you. When I'm done, I'll go back to properties and recolor. I'll make sure that the green color I want to change is selected. Then I'll change the tone of the color here. I think I want to make these leaves a little bit lighter than the other ones. I can make it darker or change the amount of red or yellow or blue up here. But I want to make the leaves lighter, so I'll drag the slider that regulates the black all the way to the left. I want to do the same thing with the flowers. I'm selecting a couple of them here. Just trying to choose them evenly over my repeat. Don't forget to select the copy too, if you're choosing one that falls outside the edge. Yeah, something like that. Then I go to recolor again. Here, I have three colors now, the black outlining and the white for the pistils. But I want to change the colors of the petals, so I'm selecting the pink one. I think I want to make this a little darker, maybe a little bit more yellow. You can really play around a bit here to see what looks good to you. Yeah, I'm happy about that. Let's see how the pattern looks now. I'm selecting everything and dragging it into the swatches panel. Then, selecting my rectangle and clicking on my new pattern swatch, there it is. As you can see, the pattern comes a little bit more to life when we color it like this. You can change the color as much as you like here, the more shades and tones you add, the more vivid your pattern will be. I'm feeling pretty happy about the result on my pattern as it is. But I'm going to do one last thing before I'm done and that is to remove or hide the black outlining. I will do that by changing its color to the same color as my background. I'll select the rectangle with my pattern and open the recolor tool. Here are all of the colors that my pattern contains. What I want to do is to change the black colo. To activate that color, I just click on the blank spot here and choose "Yes", then the black color adds to my palette and I can change it. Since I want to change the black to the same color as my background, I need to locate my background color first and if I'm not sure what color that is, I can use this little button here with a magnifying glass. Just click on it, and then click on the small color box and you'll see the objects that have that color. This light beige is my background color. As you can see, the background flickers when I click on it. Click on the magnifying glass button again to get back. To change my black to beige, I just click and grab the color and drag it into the little color box of the color I want to change, like that. As you can see now, the black is all gone. I actually think it looks a little bit flat like this, so I'm going to change the background color just a little bit. We're going to make it a little darker, I think. I make sure my background color is selected and then I make some small adjustments down here. Make it a little more yellow, I'm just changing it to a color where the lines around my motives shows a bit more. Maybe something like that, yeah. That looks good. As you can see here, illustrator has created a new pattern swatch for me with the new color changes. If I would like to change colors again, I can just go back to the recolor tool. Here are all the colors in this pattern and I can randomly change them all by selecting my color palette and using the random button. I can also switch colors here by dragging and dropping colors like this. This deck is really fun actually and I can definitely spend a lot of time finding a great color combination. But I'm pretty happy with my color as they are right now actually, so I'm hitting "Cancel", yeah. Well, now my pattern is done. The last thing I want to do is to export it, so I can upload it on Instagram.
7. Export: This is the last step in this class to export an image of our pattern that we can post on Instagram. I'm deleting this rectangle here, and then I want to create a square since the format Instagram is using for posts is square-shaped. I'll use the rectangle tool again, and with the shift key pressed down, I can click and drag to get a perfect square. Maybe something like that. Here you can scale your pattern to a bigger or smaller size if you want to, just right-click and go to Transform Scale. I like to make it a little bit bigger, I think, so it's easier to see on your phone. You can also try and move your pattern by going to Transform and Move, and make sure the transform objects box are unchecked here, just transform patterns, and here you can move the pattern horizontally and vertically as you like. I think I like it like that, yes. When I'm happy with my image, I'm going to export it, and for that, I use the asset export tool. If you don't have it open, you'll find it under Window and Asset Export. I select my pattern square and just drag it into the Asset Export window here. I can change the filename here, let's call it floral pattern. Here you can choose the file format for your image, I like to use PNG. You can change the ppi here, it doesn't have to be that high for Instagram, I will go for 150, but you can use 72 if you want to as well. Then select your image and click on "Export". I'll save it somewhere on my computer, the desktop is fine. Should you see these white lines appear on your exported image, you can go back to asset export and click on the three little lines here and choose Format Settings. Then go to the format you exported in and make sure to set it to Art Optimized. I think Type Optimized is default in Illustrator, if you haven't changed it, and then try to export again, and hopefully the lines will be gone. That's it for this class.
8. Thank You!: So that's it. Thank you so much for watching my class. I hope you have enjoyed it and that you feel very inspired to make a lot of new patterns. If you have any questions or run into trouble, don't hesitate to contact me and I will do my very best to help you. If you want feedback on your pattern or would like me to share it in my channels, please upload it in the project section of the class, I would love to see your work. All right. Until next time, take care. Bye.
Sanna Jonsson, Surface Pattern Designer & Illustrator
