Transcripts
1. Let's Make A Pattern!: I'm Molly Suber Thorpe, a Hand Lettering Artist who enjoys ink on paper calligraphy and digital hand lettering design. Today, I'm going to teach you how to make a seamless repeating pattern on the iPad using just one app; Procreate. I'll be using a simple hand letter design since that's what appeals to me most, but you can follow along with any type of simple illustration, it doesn't even have to be typographic. We're going to create a high-resolution pattern swatch, then turn it into a seamless repeating pattern that you'll be able to apply to any three-dimensional product, turn into a digital pattern brush, or even sell as a downloadable asset. I'll walk you through three different methods for turning your finished swatch into a repeating pattern design. First, we'll turn it into a Procreate brush, so you can draw your pattern on any canvas size at any scale, then export it for print. This method doesn't even require any other software, and I'll even show you how to export the brush to share and sell it too. In the second method, I'll show you how to import your swatch into Adobe Photoshop, and turn it into the industry standard type of pattern fill that you can apply to any product. I'll even walk you through how to apply it to a product mock-up image. Third, I'll show you how to make a simple vector version of your swatch in Adobe Illustrator, and turn that into a repeating vector pattern that's easily scalable and recolorable. If you're unfamiliar with Photoshop and Illustrator, don't worry, because this technique is honestly so simple that you don't need any prior experience. I'm going to walk you through the entire process from start to finish. If you don't have that software already, don't worry about that either, because in the class description, I provided a link to give you a free trial. Please share your finished product and works in progress in the class project section. If you share it on social media, please always tag me, because I love to see what my students are up to. Now, without further ado, let's make a pattern.
2. Canvas Setup: The very first thing we need to do is set up our canvas. I'm coming up here to the plus sign and the New Canvas icon. I want something very high resolution so that I'll be able to scale up the pattern down the road, so let's do 3,000 by 3,000 pixels at 600 DPI. Now on my iPad Pro, that gives me a maximum layer of 55. But if you have an iPad that doesn't even allow a file this large, don't worry, just set your width and height to 2,000 or your DPI to something lower than 600. I just always like to have the option to scale up a lot. Now, I'll hit "Create", and the reason that we've made a square canvas and that it's important that your canvas is square, is because when this pattern repeats, we need to make sure that the size of each side is identical so that it can repeat horizontally, vertically, diagonally, and be seamless with no gaps. The next canvas setup step is to add guidelines that go down the very center vertically and horizontally. I'll come up to my gear icon and select "Canvas Drawing Guide". You can see that you'll get a grid drawing guide right away but we want to immediately hit "Edit Drawing Guide". I'm coming over to a very dark color for the sake of this video so it shows up better, but you can choose any contrasting color you'd like. Now, I'll increase the grid size so dramatically that all the other grid lines fall off the edge of the art board and I'm left with just the central lines vertically and horizontally. Now, I'll hit "Done". We'll be turning these grid lines on and off as we go through this class, but I just like to have them set up in the very beginning so that I don't have to worry about those settings later on. Right now, let's turn it back off before we move to our next step.
3. Art vs. Background: Before we move on to the pattern design process, I just want to quickly share a little bit about how the backgrounds and transparent backgrounds of Procreate canvases work. While the background here appears to be white, Procreate actually views it as transparent in terms of the artwork itself. What do I mean by that? I've drawn a circle here on its own layer. If I turn it on and off, you'll see that the white background remains. If I'm on this layer and I hit the selection tool, which selects everything on that layer, you can see that the selection only impacts the circle. It does not select the full border size of my canvas because the background is considered a background not artwork. Well, for a pattern, we don't want that, we want the background shape to be the full size of the canvas and to be treated as part of the art. The very first step, which is very important, let me clear this, is to create a background layer on its own layer, not the background color layer, but layer 1, your new first blank layer. I'm going to come up here to, I don't know some semi-light but pretty bright color. How about this light pink? I'll tap my layer once and hit "Fill". Now you can see that if we come to the selection tool, the entire border is selected because Procreate sees the artwork as being this 3000 pixel by 3000 pixel size. I'll just deselect that there. Ultimately, we're going to be moving this artwork around. Again, that's another reason why it's important that it's its own artboard. Eventually, we are going to actually be moving this layer around, so that's another reason why it's important that it fills up the entire canvas and it's its own movable layer. You're also going to see in a future step that we're making multiples of this layer, and that we want to make sure that we can tell if they overlap or not. How do we do that? If the opacity is set to anything below 100 percent, then when the layers are duplicated and they overlap each other, you can see the overlapped regions. To get our canvas setup here initially, I'm just coming back to my original fill layer and I'm setting the opacity to something like 50 percent. That'll still show up in this video but it'll also be easy to see when it overlaps itself.
4. Pattern Drawing: Now the next step is the really fun one and this is drawing your artwork. As I said in the introduction, I'm going to be using a typographic design. I'm going to be drawing letters, but you can draw anything you want. Draw cat illustrations, draw triangles, have a lot of fun. You're ultimately going to see that this technique from start to finish doesn't actually take that long. If you already have illustrations that you want to incorporate, you can go into your other Procreate files, copy them and come back here and paste them in as their own layers. That's totally fine. But for the sake of this video, I think I'm going to select a thick monoline pen. This is part of my own calligraphy nib brush pack, but you can choose absolutely any design or brush that you want and I'm going to make a new blank layer. I have my color set to black because I can always change that later and I want to make sure this is really high contrast for you and shows up well on the video. I'll come over here and I'll just draw a little bit to see if I like the width of my stroke. I think that that's pretty good. I want something funky and bold and if I end up scaling this pattern to be really big, then the tinier details can get lost. When in doubt, go for something a little bit bolder, a little bit chunkier, and you won't regret it if you repeat the pattern tons of times over a product. I'm just going to draw the alphabet and then rearrange it in a minute. Here I have my alphabet and it's not much of a pattern yet, but that's completely fine. What I'm going to do now is take my selection tool, not the full selection of my artwork, but just this lasso tool where I can draw. I have it on freehand and add just in case you need to know that and I'm just going to select my letters, move them around the artboard at random. I might tilt some of them. I'm going to just mix them up a lot until I get a pattern that I like. If you want, you can use this opportunity to enlarge them, make duplicates of them, and repeat them throughout. This is really the fun part where you can fill up your canvas with something random and we will get a chance later to edit this even further, we're going to refine it twice more after this, so don't worry, this doesn't have to be final. This is all changeable again later. One extremely important thing I almost forgot, you need to make sure that your artwork stays within the artboard this time, do not let any piece of your art extend off the edge. You're going to see why in a moment but for right now, just trust me, you don't want that, that can mess up the seamlessness of the pattern. That is good for now because like I said, we're going to be editing and refining it even more later. I think I want to just add a little bit more decoration to this to fill in some of the gaps and let's do something really simple just like polka dots. For every artistic element that might need its own color later, I'm going to draw them on their own layers. I'm making a new blank layer and I'll select another, let's see, contrasting color that's definitely going to show up on camera. Let's choose like this, blue. Great. I'm just going to do some polka dots all over the piece to fill in some of these gaps, trying to make them look as random as possible. That is good for now. Next, we want Procreate to treat all three of these layers, that background fill layer, the letters, and the polka dots as one unit. The way to do that is to group them. I'll tap the top, hit "Combine down," and then move my last layer in and just reorder them so that the fill layer is still the lowest layer in my group. Now you can see that this is all one together. When I turn it on and off, Procreate sees it as one and when I hit the selection tool to move it, again, Procreate moves it like a single unit.
5. Vertical Pattern Overlap: Now we're going to do step 1 of 2 of creating the repeat. This requires the guides we set up in the beginning. So I'm going to turn on Drawing Guides here. Let me go to edit them again and just increase the thickness to maximum. So now you can see that the guides divide this into four quadrants. In the first step, we're only going to worry about the top half being divided from the bottom half, and then the next step we're worrying about the left side and the right side. So coming over to my group, I'm going to duplicate it. Swipe left, hit "Duplicate", and your group should now be doubled. Did you see how it just got darker? That is because the background that repeated is set to 50 percent opacity. So they're now one atop the other and so the 50 percent opacity doubled and it's basically like we're looking at 100 percent opacity now. If I take the selection tool, you see that I can now move them and it looks like my new group it's almost like tissue paper on top of the bottom group. So to undo that, I'm going to now zoom in very close to the center. It's really important that you are very close because, I wouldn't call this tedious, but precision is key here. So coming up to my Layers palette, I'm making sure I'm on the top group and then I'm hitting the Selection tool. I don't see the selection because I'm still zoomed in. I want to make sure that Magnetics is turned on, Freeform can be on, I just default often to uniform, but Magnetics is really important. Magnetics means that if I start moving this, I don't know if you can see this here, but some lines appear that snap you back to the horizontal or vertical or 45-degree angle of your original layer, and that's helpful here because we need to move this group that we're on now down by 50 percent. What do I mean by that? Let me just show you it's easier to view than explain. I'm just slowly moving it down and I see this snapping blue line appearing because Magnetics is on, just coming down and down and down, and I'm stopping here where I see the top of my selection. So now I know that my group that I'm moving is roughly 50 percent down the screen. Going to deselect for a second, I'm going to zoom in even more. Okay, cool. Now I re-select. Again just keep moving this down. Sometimes I like to move it slightly below the center line and keeping it selected, don't deselect yet. One trick in Procreate is if you tap right outside of your selection, you can actually move very slightly the selection in the direction that you're tapping. Soon you're roughly come to the middle line there and deselect. Now, the next movement that we do is the one that's a bit more tedious. If you were off on this, that's fine because in fact, what we're about to do is just move the first group up, that it sits flush against the top of the group we just moved and that's where that opacity comes in so that we'll know if we've done it right or if there's still some overlap. So I'm coming to the bottom group now, hitting my Selection tool, slowly moving up. I'll stop right before getting to that point so that you can see a sliver of overlap here. So I'll zoom in a lot. Select again, and then just move up, and because I have this quad grid on, and because the selection itself includes this little selection handle right in the center of my selection, I can usually pretty easily eyeball having that handle, come right into the middle of my grid lines, deselect. Now, zooming in, I don't see any overlap, but to check myself, I'll go to Canvas and turn off Drawing Guide, and I can see this is totally seamless. If it were not, I would either see a sliver of white of the background showing through or I would see a sliver of darker pink where the two layers are overlapping.
6. Pattern Tweaks 1: Now, we have this situation going on and you can see that my pattern has started to fall off the top and off the bottom but you'll also see that if this square gets repeated right above, then this is the top of my W and it's going to sit flush on this W. This is the top of my R, it's going to sit right on top of this R, creating a seamless pattern where nobody will know where your swatch started and ended. What I do see here is a little bit of empty space. This is natural, created a little bit too much margin at the bottom and the top of my first design so that when, basically, the top and bottom moved into the center, I have a little bit too much empty space here. Now's the time to adjust that. I don't want to flatten this. I don't want everything to be combined. I still want everything to be in a group. I don't want to flatten it. What I'm doing is tapping the top group and hitting "Combine Down", don't hit "Flatten". Now, all my layers are in a single group. I have the lower half of my background, the top half of my background and here, I'm not sure you can see them very well but I know that these two layers are my letter layers. You don't have to merge them but I will, I'll just tap one and I'll merge it down so that I have all my letters again on one layer. I'll do the same with my polka dots. I'm moving them so that they sit next to each other and merging down. If you merge your background layer, that is fine but then the opacity will go away so you might want to set them back to 100 percent then merge them and then move back down to 50 percent. Now, I have again, one group where the initial phase, the top-bottom phase of the repeat, has been accomplished. But like I said, there's a little bit of awkward, weird space in the middle so I am going to fix that. Coming over to my letters layer, I'm just going to further adjust my letters so that they more naturally fill in this space. You could draw new illustrations if there's a big enough blank space and you want to add a whole new illustration. I'll move my polka dots a little bit and I think I'll even add a couple more polka dots to the polka dot layer. Remember how I said that there are going to be two opportunities to refine, that's because we're going to be able to do the same thing basically that we just did when we create the left-right overlap, so let's do that now.
7. Horizontal Overlap + Tweaks 2: I'm going to move a little bit faster this time, because this is identical to the previous step. It's just about horizontal movement not vertical. So I'll duplicate my group. I will turn on my drawing guides and we'll zoom in, a lot. Making sure my top group is selected, I will hit the direct select tool, the white arrow, and I'll slowly move it across the screen, because its magnetic is turned on. I'm able to do that and make sure that I am remaining right in the center. Tap the selection tool to turn it off. Tap my lower group and repeat. Select, slowly move. Here I'll pause to zoom in even more. Here I see that there's still a bit of overlap. That is apparently because,the first layer that I just moved, I actually moved it a bit to the left of the central line. That is completely fine, because like I said, all that's going to matter is that they seamlessly meet somewhere in the middle so that if the left side is repeated against the right side, they're going to match up. We deselect here and I'll zoom in. You'll see that this is completely seamless. Let me turn off the drawing guides and re-evaluate. Here again, tap the top group, hit combine down, open them up and merge your two-letter layers. I'm merging my two polka dot layers. Here is where if you want, you can get rid of the background. We aren't going to need it anymore. Here I'm going to, let see, move first some of the letters. The one thing that you do not want to move or touch are any of the pattern that is going off the edge or touching the edge at all. Like if I were to move this R right here, it would mess up how it coordinates with the R down here. Those are the only things you don't want to touch. Basically everything else, you just want to move it so that it is fitting a little bit nicer in the center of your pattern. You can erase some of these polka dots because I think that they're too close together now. Okay. I think that we're good. We'll always have the opportunity to come back and add more into the center of this if we want, but this is great for now, I can show you how to turn this into a repeating pattern.
8. Procreate Pattern Brush Part 1: Now that we've set up the repeats on all four sides, let's have fun with our pattern. Let's test it and make sure that it's seamless. The best way to do that here in Procreate is to turn this into a pattern brush, and that is surprisingly easy. I'm first going to start by duplicating this entire file. I don't want to mess this up. I don't want to do something where I'm accidentally going to lose my work. So coming into my gallery, I'll swipe left on my file and hit "Duplicate", and now I'll just open one of the copies and I can mess around with this without worrying that I'll lose any work. Here we have our work and I'm going to just tap it once and flatten it. Now when you create Procreate brushes of any kind, they don't just have to be pattern brushes, the file used to create the brush has to be pure black and pure white. Whatever in your brush image is black is going to be transparent in your brush. It's not going to be part of the brush shape, and whatever is white is going to be the actual content and shape if your brush. So what does that mean for us here? It means that we want the background to be black so that our brush will have a transparent background, and take on the background color that we set ourselves in the file and the brush itself when you draw with it, you'll be drawing the letters and the polka dots. So that should be white. We're going to make sure that the background is pure black by tapping on background color, coming over to value, you may already have a pure black swatch, but I just want to make sure for everyone at home that we set this up with 100 percent black. So on this slider, I am moving it all the way down to the pure black edge, making sure that the RGB values are zero. The hexadecimal code for black is six zeros in a row by the way if you need to know, and if you don't already have this in your palette, once you set pure black, you can come and tap over here and it will add it into your palette for quick access in the future. So now I have a pure black background, but my letters have vanished. I'm going to make a new layer, tap it once, and hit "Clipping mask." Now whatever I put into this layer will only affect the art layer below it. Now I'll come up here again to value and do the reverse. Move this all the way up to white, and now I'll move the RGB all the way up to the right side as well. So for white, all these sliders on the right, for black, they're all on the left. The hexadecimal for white is six Fs. Now I'll come back to my layers, tap once and fill. Now we can see if we turn this on and off our artwork is pure white, and our background is pure black. Now we need to export a flattened version of this so that we can import it as a brush. I'll come up here to my wrench and do share image JPEG. This just saves it to my camera roll right here on the iPad.
9. Procreate Pattern Brush Part 2: Now, to make our brush, I am just going to come over to our Brush Library and tap this plus sign here. This just opens up a new brush with all the default Procreate brush settings. We'll start by adding our pattern. So come over to Grain, and then I hit Edit, Import, Import a photo. Now, in my photos, I'll navigate to the file that I just exported and I'll hit "Done". Everything else here can remain the same as the defaults. We're going play with scale in just a second but everything else here can remain the same. Come up to Stroke Path and make sure spacing is turned to zero. That makes sure that your pattern remains seamless and that there's no wonkiness created as each swatch is placed. Your shape by default will be this round circle and you can just leave that. Now, you hit "Done". I'm going to turn off my art layers here and make a new layer. I'll just stay on the white, we'll see what happens when I start painting with my new brush. I am painting with my pattern. You can see now if I change the background color to anything else, the pattern itself is the white they drew but where there was black, is now transparent. That's pretty cool, but what if I want the letters to be a lot bigger? I think that the scale of this is too small. That's easy. I just come back to my brush, tap once, come to Grain, now I can increase the scale. Hit "Done" and test it out. Now, of course, I can have a lot of fun with this too and paint it in with colors. Now, the one last thing I'll recommend for your brush design is that if you plan to share this with anyone and especially if you plan to sell it, please give it a good name, put your photograph, your name, your signature, and a reset point so that your copyright information is stored and you are really listed as the author of this brush. Let me do that for you quickly here. I have a photo suitable for this saved in my photos on my iPad so that I can always throw it in here really quickly. Then Create new reset point, save. Now, you can see right down here it gives you the date and time that it was created. If you make edits to the brush, you can come back here and again, hit Create new reset point again and then if your brush ever gets reset to defaults, that new reset point will be the default.
10. Time-Lapse Review of Steps: Now I thought it might be helpful in order to review all of the steps so far, for me to demonstrate one more pattern, start to finish, and this time with less talking and pauses. I'll even speed it up a little bit so that you can just follow along and it'll drive home everything step-by-step. You can skip this video too if you want right now, or just come back to it at the end. I already have my square canvas created, and I have already made an alphabet, so I'll spare you that part. I've pasted it in here and now I'm just going to get started rearranging it.
11. Export for Adobe CC: Here's a pattern that I already created. If you're looking to make a more industry-standard version of your pattern, so that instead of just exporting a flat version of it for like a fabric or a wrapping paper, but you want to be able to apply it to any type of three-dimensional product and sell it on an online marketplace. Then you're going to want to do that in Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator by turning it into a pattern fill swatch. If you don't know how to use these programs already, it's not nearly as intimidating as it sounds, I'm going to walk you through absolutely every step. If you don't have Photoshop and Illustrator already, I've put a link in the class description for a free Adobe trial. So if we take a look at the layers of my file here, you'll see that what I have is a pure white background, my ampersand design done in pure black, and then a polka dot design that's done in gray, 50 percent black. But for Photoshop and Illustrator, that black and white rule goes out the window. So I'm going to color the ampersands and the polka dots here, just so that we have something cool to work with on the computer, so going to clip this in here, and I'm going to just put a very bright color in so that it will show up well on camera. Same for the polka dots, copy my fill layer clipping mascot in there. I have my polka dots set it to 50 percent opacity, so I'll keep them blue, but I'll just keep them at 50 percent opacity. So this is a single color pattern, it's just not black and white. It's a little bit more fun. So now coming to the Gear icon, I'm going to hit, "Share", and instead of sharing a JPEG which will include the background as part of the art, I want to export it with a transparent background, so I'm going to select a PNG file. Now I'll airdrop it to my computer, but you could email it to yourself, you could save it to your files, your Cloud, your Drive, your Dropbox, what have you. But I'm sitting right next to my computer here, so I'm just going to send it over.
12. Photoshop Pattern Fill Swatch: Here, I am in Photoshop, and I'm going to just start by opening up that PNG file that I transferred to my computer a moment ago, "File", "Open". Turning this into a pattern swatch in Photoshop is surprisingly easy. I'm just coming to "Edit", "Define Pattern". I'm going to just call it Ampersands, and hit ''Okay''. Now, it has been made into a pattern, but you don't see it anywhere yet. Now, you come up to "Window", "Patterns" to open your pattern palette. If you're going to be using your pattern palette a lot, you can just always drag and drop it into your toolbar. Now, you see the swatch from my pattern appears right here. What if I want to fill a whole layer with this pattern? Well, let's turn this one off. I'll come to "Layer", "New Fill Layer", "Pattern", and I can leave everything as it is and hit ''Okay''. Now, I can select from my pattern library the pattern I want to use, and here also, I can change the scale of it. I can even change the angle if I want the pattern to be shifted at any kind of degree that I choose, and I'll hit ''Okay''. Another extremely easy way of filling a layer with a pattern is to create your blank layer and then just hit Shift Delete. This opens a different type of fill palette, and I think that by default, it'll be on something else, so you'll just come to "Contents" and choose "Pattern", select your pattern. Here, you cannot change the scale, this is like a slightly lesser way, but it's much faster if you don't mind filling your layer with a pattern at its default size. You can also come and hit ''Export Selected Patterns'', and this we'll see that as a pattern file which can be helpful if you want to share it with a printer. Sometimes this is necessary for certain types of workflow just so that you know this is how you would go about sharing this particular pattern swatch.
13. Photoshop Product Mockup: Now let's say that you want to apply your pattern using Photoshop to a mockup of a three-dimensional product. Now, mockups are great fun and it's really easy to find layered Photoshop mockup files on the Internet, either for free or pretty affordable prices. I'm going to link down in the class description some of my favorite websites for getting these, in case you need a jump start on finding some of your own. But here I want to mockup what this pattern might look like on wrapping paper. I have this wrapping paper mockup. Now, all of these good Photoshop layered mockup files, have a layer that looks something like this. You'll see that it has an icon in the lower right corner. The layer often be called something like artwork layer, or replace me, or something like that. If you double-click it, it opens in its own new tab. See, this was my previous, and now this tab just opened when I double-click the artwork layer. Here you can see that this layer right now is just filled with pink. That's the pink color that is coloring the mocked-up wrapping paper here. But I want to see what happens if I put my pattern here. What I'm going to do, is to layer new fill layer pattern, select my ampersands, and here I really do want to change the scale to something much smaller. I think that a whole sheet of wrapping paper, should have something a little bit smaller than this. I like that, so I'll say ''Okay''. Now, if I want my background color layer to shine through, I can be on my pattern layer and select any sort of blending layer mode, like the type of opacity. You can have a lot of fun with this, like if I choose multiply, it knocks out all of the white. If I choose overlay, and that's a cool look. I actually think that's funky and cool. Now, if I double-click this layer, I can change the color of it pretty quickly. I think that that's actually cute. Now all I have to do is save this and go back to my first tab, and like magic automatically, it appears in my mockup. I can just keep going back and forth between these tabs and making adjustments. Hit "Save", and check it out again.
14. Illustrator: Make a Vector Pattern Swatch: Now, what if you want to make a pattern that is made from a vector? Which means it's going to be much easier to recolor and also when you scale it, there will be absolutely no pixelation. Some printers and manufacturers actually prefer or maybe even require vectors. In that case, mastering this technique is going to be very beneficial for you, but it's absolutely not necessary for every pattern application. So here in Illustrator, I am going to make a new file, File, New, and let's make it 1,500 pixels by 1,500 pixels, and the DPI is set to 300. Create. Now I have just a square here and I'm going place the PNG file from the iPad that I previously imported to my computer. So File, Place, and I'll navigate to that PNG. I want to make sure that this icon here link is unchecked and that's going to make sure that the file I'm bringing in gets embedded. I'll hit "Place", and you'll see that a preview thumbnail appears connected to my cursor. I will just click and drag it out. I don't have to press anything on the keyboard to fill my art board. If for some reason you don't feel the art board and you randomly click and it becomes a smaller image, all you have to do is come here to Width and Height and enter 1,500 pixels by 1,500 pixels and then drag it to fit in art board. So how to get this vectorized? Well, in Adobe Illustrator, the newer versions have really powerful live trace tools, more than ever before, and with a design like this one that I created, where the edges of my artwork are very smooth, it's going to be very easy for Illustrator to detect those edges and create a pretty accurate factor tracing. If the artwork that you created with something much more painterly, like a watercolor illustration, the lectures really isn't going to be your best friend. It's not going to work very well for you, but then again, it's quite rare that illustrative painted artwork has to be vectorized anyway. So this really is a technique that's better suited to, it doesn't have to be single color, but more like line art and artwork with smooth edges. That lends itself well to lots of types of illustration though, including a lot of hand lettering. I'm going to select this piece and come up here to Image Trace. If you don't see that there, all you have to do is come to Object, Image Trace, Make, and this is creating just the most basic initial guess at a live trace, but this isn't exactly perfect. We lost those polka dots. I see that some things aren't exactly accurate. Now I can come up here to my Image Trace panel, which is also accessible through Window, Image Trace. I'm just going to play around a little bit. The first and most important thing to do is toggle down this Advanced tab and hit "Ignore White", and now the whole background that's appearing as white will go away and it's actually transparent. It's not going to visibly show anything to you yet, because your art board is also white, most likely, but it did take that white away. Now, generally for my own hand lettering, I like to move the paths cursor somewhere pretty high and I like to move corners and noise pretty low. Now, to bring back my semi-transparent little polka dots, I want to change my mode from black and white to gray-scale, so that it detect things that aren't solid dark colors. There you go. This made it gray, but I'm going to show you how I can just now easily change this color to anything that I want. I'll click out of my Image Trace palette and hit "Expand" up here, and now you can see all of these bezier curve markers, which just means that this is now a vector. Let's see over here, let's say that I tap "Black". You'll see that everything now just changed to black. If I double-click this, let's change it to be something more fun. So this is really easily recoverable and scalable now, and it's a vector. So let's hit "Save" before anything happens. Now, to make this vector into a pattern, it is super easy, almost easier than in Photoshop. All I'm going to do is come to Window, Pattern Options and then in the flyout menu say "Make Pattern". I will name it ampersands, and I'll say "Size Tile To Art", which just makes sure that the art board, which is 1,500 and 1,500, is going to be the same as my artwork so that you won't get any borders if your artwork is slightly different size from your art board. Now down here, I'll zoom out a bit. This copies three by three. What that means is that your center original piece of artwork counts as one tile, and the tile to the left and to the right of it are two more. So you have three tiles across by three tiles down. You can change this in your Preview settings to have more or fewer, just the middle one, and you can also change the opacity of those previews. So if you put it on 100 percent, you get a very good sense of what the final pattern will look like. But it can be very helpful to have it much dimmer so that you can make edits without being distracted, so that you know exactly where your swatch starts and ends. If you want to pause your screen right now and take a screen capture of my settings here, feel free. Now I'll just come up here to the top and hit "Done". Now you can see over here in the swatch list view that ampersands appears as a pattern. With that done, we do not need our original artwork anymore. That original artwork is now saved inside of that patterns swatch. It's still editable, but we don't need the file here on our art board anymore. Let's come over here to this shape tool, like let's say this Star tool. I draw a star out here, and I have it currently set on pink, but I want to fill it with my ampersand pattern. So all I do is select it and click the pattern. There you go. It appears. Same thing if I make, let's say a circle. Now, what happens if I want to scale this? I want the pattern inside the star to be much smaller, but I don't want to change the entire pattern itself because I want the pattern inside the circle to stay at that scale. What I need to do then is transform it, and the fastest way is to right-click and find the Transform menu but you can also go to Object, Transform, and Scale. Now here, if I turn on Preview, you can see that I have these options Transform Object, Transform Patterns. I only want to work with the pattern. I don't want to shrink or enlarge the star shape itself. So I'll turn off Transform Objects but keep Transform Patterns on, and then up here on Uniform Scale, let's set this to say 50 percent, and you can see that immediately the star stayed the same and the pattern changed. Now, what happens if you want to change the color of this? All you have to do is double-click your pattern, I'm hitting "Command A" to select all and I'm clicking on a "New Swatch". If I hit Done, then this is still technically the original pink ones. So it's going to save the black over the pink. So I want to cancel out of this and now you'll see that the black pattern exists over here and the pink one exists. So you can just keep playing around with this. I'm opening up the black one here and I'm going to say, I want this ampersand in all of them to be bright purple. Now, when I zoom out, you'll see that that one is purple and you can just have so much fun recoloring this however you would like. That's one of the coolest things about vectors. Now, if I hit again, "Save A Copy", Cancel. I can put my colorful ampersands in here. Let me scale that down. Hit "Okay". The other cool thing I wanted to just show you is that here in Illustrator, I drew a basic solid fill circle and I placed it in the back behind my patterns. I just want to use this to illustrate that your pattern itself, because we hit Ignore White when we were tracing it, your pattern itself has a transparent background and it will take on whatever background color you apply it to.
15. Illustrator: Export a Print-Ready Pattern: Now, if you want to be using these patterns in other Illustrator files, you'll want to come to the flyout menu swatches and say "Save Swatch Library as AI", which just means as an Illustrator file, and that makes it really easy to open up again in other Illustrator files. I'll just save this wherever I want. Now, before I leave you, I'm going to give you an example of a very practical way to utilize these patterns, let's say for a printing project. How about you want to print some wrapping paper and the printer requires a file that is 18 by 24 inches with a 0.125-inch bleed? That is probably pretty typical. So I'll come to File, New, set my board two inches, 24 wide by 18 high, and my bleed is 0.125 inches. With this lock icon turned on, it automatically fills the other fields. Keep it at 300 DPI, and hit "Create". I immediately want to open those patterns swatches that I just saved, so I'll come to my Swatch palette, hit the flyout menu, and say "Open Swatch Library". Now, because I just had them open and saved, it's showing it to me here as a preview. But if it's not, if you've recently closed Illustrator and reopened it, you can go to other library and navigate to it on a computer. I'll just open it here, and you see how it opens in this nice little separate palette. You can always add more swatches to this and re-save over that file, and you'll be able to continue opening it time and time again. All I'm going to do is navigate to my rectangle tool and draw a rectangle that fills the artboard all the way up to the bleed line. Over here, I'm going to turn off that default stroke. I don't want a border. Then I'm coming back to the fill and I'm going to my patterns swatches, and I'm filling it with my swatches. Right-click, Transform, Scale. I do not want to transform the object, just the pattern. I can change the scale to whatever I want, like that, 60 percent. Honestly, I can just save this. Certain printers will want different formats, but when you go to File, Save As, you can select probably among the two files that most printers would want, which would be a PDF or an EPS, which is another vector format. So let's save ours as a PDF. Save. For the sake of this class, I'll just say High-quality print, and Save PDF. Now, you have here as a PDF, your print-ready file that you can send along to any printer and have your patterned product created.
16. Tag Me in Your Work (Please!): Thank you so much for following along today. I hope that you enjoyed this class and that if you share your work, you really will tag me on social media, so that I can have a peak. I always like to see what my students are up to, whether it's from my Skillshare classes, my downloadable products, my books, or my other tutorials. I hope to see you back in another of my Skillshare classes. But in the meantime, you might want to check out my YouTube channel where I offer bite-size tutorials and demonstrations as well. Until next time, bye bye.
Molly Suber Thorpe, Calligrapher & Designer
