Simplified Pattern Design

1. Introduction: Welcome to Surface Pattern Design. My name is Shelley Seguinot and I'm not going to be teaching your class. I'm the owner of I'm Inkpressed, a children's stationery company. I love to doodle and I love watching my totals come to life. I use Adobe Illustrator for most of my creations and I'm going to show you on a step-by-step process on how I create my pattern design. Pattern design is versatile. It can be applied to any products. You can use it for home, you can use it for personal or for business. Get your design started with pattern design. In this class, I'm going to teach you how to sketch your designs that would best work with your patterns. I'm going to then show you how to bring your palindromes into Illustrator and bring them to life. This is going to be a really fun class. For the class project I'm going to show you step-by-step on how to create your very own personalized folded note card set featuring your own patterns. So join me, this is going to be a fun one. 2. Sketching: I just want to show you a few of the tricks of the trade that I use. I like to use these pencils, they're the Staedtler, set of six. I don't normally use them all. Just for my doodling, I like to use the HB pencil. It is definitely the lighter one. The method that I use is after I doodle, I have to erase. I have to trace with a marker and then I have to erase. If I use any of these darker shades, I do end up having to either leave marks behind or I do have to erase more. If I use this lighter pencil, it just works better for me. As far as markers, I like to use the Micron set. This set of markers is really what works best for me. It's really a matter of preference. There's so many in the market that you can pick from, but I like to use this Micron set. You can get it at Hobby Lobby or at Michaels. The set comes with a different thicknesses of the points. The one I use the most is the 0.5. The 0.5 point is not too thick, not too thin. But it also comes with a brush set. It also comes with a very light one, 0.0005. It comes with a really thick one, just a one. But for what we're using it for, I like to use just the 0.5. We're going to get started with just light doodles. Again, I just want to show you for my process, but this is not what you need to do. You can just doodle to your heart's content. You can draw flowers, you can draw animals, you can draw just a myriad of things. I just want to show you my process. I just start off by doodling. I can start off just with a simple stem. There's really no right or wrong here. You can doodle in any, which way you want, create whatever objects you want. It doesn't have to necessarily be flowers. It can be anything else. It could be just abstract shapes. It really just does come down to you on what it is that you wanted to draw. You just want to bear in mind, when you're doodling, that you want varying shapes because that's what's going to make your patterns look pretty. You want varying shapes and sizes. Don't worry too much about the sizes because that we can always reshape and resize once we get it into Illustrator, but we just want a nice array of different shapes. Then the rest of it will just come naturally. Now, you want to keep your lines, you don't want to put too much pressure down on the pencil because we do need to erase this in the end. I'll show you when we get to that point, but we just don't want it to be too, too dark that if we erase them, we still see the lines underneath because then it gets a little confusing when we get to our part where we have to trace with our marker. I'm just going to do a few abstract shapes here. Nothing too busy. Nothing too much just so I can have a few things to play with. Now, it doesn't necessarily mean that everything that I'm drawing I'm going to use. I will import it, but I won't necessarily use it all because it may or may not work with, once I import it, I may see, "Yeah, that doesn't work and this shape doesn't go here." Once I figure out exactly what it is that I want, then I can always subtract or add to my existing doodles. We're just going to add one more here. This is just very light doodling. I actually doodle every single day of my life before I go to bed, I find it really therapeutic to just doodle. It's something that I've always done even as a kid. If you just get into the habit of doodling, you'll be surprised how many shapes and designs you can come up with. I just keep it all in this sketchpad, and then eventually, when I'm getting ready to come up with a new design, I refer back to my doodles and I pick and choose what it is that I want to bring in or not bring in. I always like to draw something that has a half-moon shape and I'll show you why when we get into Illustrator. But I find that if I have at least one of these shapes, where I can place it over patterns, I'm able to move it around. So I don't pay too much attention to the direction that my doodles go into. For example, this one is going in this particular direction. I can always flip that when I get into Illustrator so I'm not too concerned with that. I just want to be able to have enough to play around with so when I do get into the Illustrator phase, then I can always play around with it better. I'm just going to add a few more. Maybe this one will have leaves. Like I said, this is very rough sketching. It doesn't necessarily have to be in this particular order. But I try to add somewhat of shapes that will all work well together in the end. You can source that out with mood boards and just have a general idea. If you're working towards a specific pattern, then you want to have a general idea of what types of flowers maybe you want to use and so on and so forth. Let's just add a little daisy here. That's a very rough sketch. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to trace one of them just so you can see. What I do is, I try to just follow the lines the best I can. You're obviously not going to stay within the lines because it just never works out that way, but we're going to erase the lines, the pencil lines that show below, and the reason why we do that is so we don't get confused when we scan our image. I'm not going to go and trace all of these and bore you with this tracing portion. I just wanted you to get a rough idea of what exactly my process is. Then off-camera, I'm just going to finish tracing the rest of them, but I just wanted to show you what the process is. After you're done tracing it with the marker, we're just going to lightly go over with a really good eraser and we're going to just erase it all so we don't have those pencil marks showing, and when we scan in our image then it'll make it all just a clean line that we can trace. I'm going to go ahead and finish the rest of it. Then in our next section what we're going to do is, when you're done tracing everything, I need you to scan it. You can either scan either using an iPhone or a smartphone, you can take a picture of it and then upload it to your computer and bring that into Illustrator. Or if you have a scanner on hand, you can also scan it at a high-quality scan, and then bring that into Illustrator and we'll work from there. In the next lesson, what we're going to cover is, this will already be a scanned image in the computer and we'll start digitizing our work. 3. Digitizing: Now that we have imported our image into Illustrator, we're going to begin tracing our image. What we're going to do is, first of all, we are going to create a new layer. We keep this scanned image intact. For that, we're going to open up the layers palette. If it's not open, you can go to Windows and then click on "Layers", and that'll open up your pop-up window. We're going to go down here to where it says create new layer and we'll click on that and that creates a new layer. Now this is the layer we're going to be working on. We don't want to work on this bottom layers so make sure this top layer, Layer 2 is always selected. You can rename it if you want. You can click on and rename it Outline or whatever else is easy for you to identify with, and this is where we're going to put all of our drawn images. Now the first thing I do and this is just for my personal preference, I like to work in the color palette that I'm going to eventually end up with. I'm going to go and draw some inspiration. I will go into Pinterest and I've already put in color palette as my search. I'm just going to find one that will work well with my flowers. I mean, I can spend all day on these color palettes. I have an extensive board that I've created inside my Pinterest boards just for colors, but just find one that speaks to you. This one seems to be really nice for flowers. It doesn't have to have greens in it. You don't have to have green leaves. It's your world, you paint your flowers whatever colors you want. I actually like this one. Once you've found one that you do like, you can just click on it and drag it to your, I clicked a little too much. There we go. Sorry about that. You can just click and drag it and you can drag it right onto your art board. That didn't work. We'll click and drag right onto the art board. There we go. Now what we're going to do is we're going to create a color palette. To do so, we're just going to drag out a series of shapes. It doesn't have to be perfect shapes, we need a few shapes just so we can use the Eyedropper tool and select all of the colors in this palette. You just click on your shape. You're going to use the Eyedropper tool, click on the color you want, and that changes the color immediately. This is a very pretty color palette. There we go and one more. Now we no longer need this image, we can delete that. We can select all of these by clicking and dragging, and here in the swatches palette, we're just going to hit this new color group folder and we're going to name this floral. You don't have to name it if you don't want to. I mean, you're going to be working in this palette, so it doesn't really matter. You click "Enter", and now it placed all your colors in here. This we don't need, we can delete. The reason why I work in my color palette or you just need a wide array of colors because this is what we're going to do, and I make sure you're back in outlines, you're not writing over the Layer 1 pallet. We're back in layer in outline and we're going to go to the Paintbrush tool. We're going to select a color. Let's see. We use this color just for the outline for the stroke, and I'm going to go right in here into the Blob Brush tool. In this paintbrush pallet, you're going to have the Paintbrush tool and the Blob Brush tool. We want the Blob Brush tool. Then you can actually zoom in so you can get a bit more precise. What I'm going to do is you can tell already that this is going to be a little bit too wide. We don't want it to be that thick of a line. We're going to double-click here and enter size, it's at eight points, maybe we'll make this five points and that's better. We're just going to click and drag, and that's going to color our stem there. Now here's the tricky part. We don't want to now continue these stems in the same color unless we have all intents and purposes to make these stems always the same color as this main stem. The reason is once you do that, the Blob tool, I will show you as an example, the Blob tool is going to identify this as one shape. It automatically, as you can see here melts it altogether. If you don't want this to be the same color, the stems to be the same color as the main stem, then you won't want to do that. I actually like the way that looks. So I'm just going to continue working on here and adding my stems. As you can see, I can deviate from the plan as much as I want. It's my flower arrangement. I'll do with it as I want. There we go. That's it. Now we don't want to color these in the same color, these petals, because what we'll end up with is just one big blob and we won't be able to change the colors in the future. I'm now going to go and select a different color for my color palette, and I'm going to outline this as well. Perfect. If you find that it's still too thick the line, you can make it thinner. It really comes down to your drawing styles, so it doesn't have to be as thick as mine is here. You can make it as thin as you want, and I just want to show you what happens if you also use the fill stroke and fill the same. As you can see here, the fill is in that color. If we use the stroke, the stroke just makes it bigger. It's not like it's going to fill it in here in the center. If you want to fill in the center, I'll show you. You can just click on it. We can click on the "Bucket tool". That's not the Bucket tool. The Bucket tool always hides on me for some odd reason. The Bucket tool, there we go. The Bucket tool is right here with the Shape Builder tool. So we're going to click on the bucket and as you can see right away, I get these three colors which is the last color that I've used. If I click right on there, it fills it for me. You can see. Unfortunately, each time you do that, you have to click on the image, then click on the bucket and then fill it. I know it's a bit of a tedious process and you're probably asking yourself, "Well, why on earth is she not using the Live Trace tool that Illustrator has come up with?" A little later, I'm going to go in depth and show you why I chose this method and not the other method. The Live Trace is not very precise for my taste. You may find that it works better for you and you may find that this is just a little too tedious, but I like to have full control of my artwork. There you have it. Now I'm going to continue on here and fill in one of these other ones. Still with that selected, I'm just going to finish off these flowers. If you don't like how something comes out, take your time with it. Make sure that you are drawing to your heart's content and that everything is precisely the way you had envisioned it. Here we go. Now we're going to select them all, we're going to go to the Paint Bucket tool and we're going to fill in the blanks here. I actually like how that looks better. I usually go for that outline look, but I think I like how this looks better. It looks like hearts. That works good for me. Now I'm going to select another color and I'm going to work on the stem. Here we go. Let's follow it the best we can. Now if you have a tablet, you can use that as well. I'm just so used to using the mouse, so it comes naturally to me, but it's a bit more of a natural process but I definitely like using my mouse. If you are more used to using your tablet or if you would like to try out a tablet, you can definitely find one somewhere. I'd suggest you renting one or getting your hands on one through a friend or something where you can first try it out because it is hit or miss. Unless you get a really high-end one, it's very hard to get used to it. It just doesn't come naturally to me. I like to use my mouse overall, but you may find that doesn't work for you and the tablet works better for you and you can go right ahead, and there are apps that you can use on your iPad that will do this same process. Some of them are not as precise as this but you can try them. If you're an on the go person and that's what works better for you, then go right ahead and try that. There are several apps that you can use. Off the top of my head I just can't remember any. But I will look them up and post them for you so you have them as a reference because that is also a nice tool to have especially if you're on the go. You don't want to stop your creative juices from flowing and not be able to produce your work just because you happen to be away from your computer. There you have it. Now I'm just going to fill in the petals here, I'm going to select a different color. That's a beautiful maroon. Perfect. I'm going to fill that in as well. That pop-up just keep saying, "Remember you have to select it." I know I have to select it. There we go. If you've taken any of my other classes, you do know that I tend to change my mind. Chances are that these colors may not in the end be with me. I may end up choosing a whole different color palette. I like to play around one color. It's one of my favorite things to do. I may or may not wind up with the colors that you see here, and I'll show you a little later how you can easily change the colors. I'm just going to turn off this layer just so you can see where we stand now. I'm going to continue to color in the rest of it and then I'll meet you in. 4. LIve Trace: Now, I'm done outlining my image. I'm going to shut off the layer 1 palette so you can see what it looks like. It's a very nice organic image. The shapes are nice and clean. There's a couple of things that we can do to tweak it to make it look a little better. I'm going to zoom in just to show you. When we went in and we created each image separately, by doing so with the blob brush tool, each color became its own image. Let's say I wanted to move this stem behind the petals. I can still treat it as if it were any other vectors. I can do object, arrange, send to the back and now the petals are in the front. I may choose to do that here in there where it may look better like you can see here. I don't like that this stem is there in the front, so I'm going to bring this to the front. You can do that and you can go cleaning your image up. I also don't like that this has somewhat of jagged edges. You can go into your palette here and where the pencil tool is, there's a tool called a smooth tool. I can just lightly go over it and it starts to round off my shape a little better. It gives me just a bit more of an organic look and not so much of those rough edges. I like how that looks better. I see something here that I don't like too much. I can smooth this out as well. You can just go around doing that. You have to remember that when you sketched it, your brain saw it one way and then by the time you bring it into the sketched part here, by the time you've outlined it, it just takes on a whole new life. There may be things that you liked on paper and pencil that once you bring it into here, you may not like it so much. See for instance here how this extends. This extend, I don't really like how that looks. I can go into the eraser tool. You really want to zoom in just to do that. I want to just clean that up a little bit. I'll clean this up a little bit here, just so we can make it look a bit more realistic. There we go. Then if you still don't like how that looks, you can go back to the smooth tool, smooth that out. There we go. You can just go around and see what you don't like, what you like, what you want to. I mean, you can get really muddy in here and try to change everything around. But if you really zoom in, you'll find a lot of little things that you just want to change. Don't obsess too much over it, but you just want to look pretty and clean. For now I think that looks pretty good. Now, I just want to tackle the live trace tool with you. I'm going to show you the way it works and in the end you may choose that it is a good tool for you. For me, I like to have control of every little turn and every little nook and cranny of my design. I don't particularly like the lack of control that live trace gives me. I'm just going to show you what I mean. We're going to turn on the sketch layer and we're going to shut off the outline layer for now. Then we're going to select it and here on the palette you're going to see it says image trace. If you don't have it, you can go to window. Right here you go to image trace and bring up a pop-up window that way. But for me here I happen to have it on my toolbar. I'm going to click on image trace. This just says that the image is so large that it's going to take a little while because it's not rasterized and that's okay. Now you can see it change to like this darker pen mark. It's just the darker black outline. Right now I still can't click on any of the aspects of my sketch. I need to click on expand, and that now expands it into a vector. I can select it, but still it's now all grouped. We can go to object, ungroup and now we're able to click on individual ones. I'm going to click on this outside bounding box and I'm going to hit Delete and that now leaves me with the organic sheets. Now, let's just focus on this sketch for now. As you can see, it's a very rough edged sketch. If I were to apply any color, it applies it to the entire unit. I can't separate these petals because when I sketched it out, I didn't take the time out to close every single opening. If I would have closed everything out and separated the stems, I would've been able to color everything differently, but because I didn't take the time to do that when I was sketching, it's not going to let me do that. I like to free sketch. Just whatever comes to mind, I jot it down on paper, and that method works better for me to have to think about our closing points. Once I bring them into Illustrator, gets a little confusing for me. Now I can color in the inside of these petals as you can see. Because what happens is because I did close these, it's identifying it as a white teardrop shape. While all of this out here is all one connected piece. But when I come to here, I'm going to run into the problem that I can't color that in. It's not full-proof. It's a good quick fix. It's obviously not going to give us the organic look that we did with the outline image. I'm just going to toggle back to the outline image to show you. To me this is more organic, more natural than this image. But you may like this line work better. Again, it's really up to you. I just wanted to show you both methods so you can decide on what works best. 5. Setting up your pattern: Now we're going to begin by grouping our elements into separate icons, this way we'll make them more movable. We're just going to select all the loose pieces of this first icon. I'm going to group it, object, group, and move that out of the way. Then I'm going to take this one and I think I want to keep that as a whole, so I'm going to group it and move that out of the way a little bit. Then this leaf, object, group. You're just going to do this for all your elements so you're able to move them around without losing any parts. Here's this little guy, [inaudible] object, group. Now, we're going to move a little bit off the art board here. This is a very important step to remember. You're going to go into your rectangle tool and you're going to double-click it. You're going to double-click out of the box and that's going to bring up the rectangle tool dimensions. The dimensions that you put in here is not as important as one would think. You just would have to put in either eight inches by eight inches or 10 by 10. This is the art board here, let me just click off of that real quick to show you. The art board here is set as a letter size. I want it to be at least this size. Let's say I can make it 10 by 10, just so my elements will fit in it. I'm going to go off the board here, double-click to bring up this rectangle pop-up box and I'm going to do 10 by 10 inches. Now you have to remember the dimensions you used because that step is really important. Right now it just defaulted to the last color I used. Let's make this white for now. Then I'm going to start bringing in my elements. This is one of my main icons, so I want to put that one front and center. As you can see, my rectangle shape is in front of everything, so I'm just going to quickly object, arrange, send to the back, so I can make sure that all my icons are forward. I'm just going to add maybe this guy here. Let's see, let's maybe move this guy down and add this guy over it. Then remember when I said when I was sketching that you always want shapes, a few shapes at least that will curve in a way just so you don't fit properly when you try to put them up against other shapes. There's some flow to them, because if you just draw everything linear the way this is, then it's harder to create the pattern. You'd have to fill in a lot of little flowers maybe in between. This takes a little bit of that guesswork out of it if you already in your sketch created the flow. For now, I'm going to leave that like that and nothing is set in stone, I can always move things around. Let's put this guy here and maybe scale it a little bit. Maybe holding down shift so I don't distort the proportions, I'm going to click and drag. That looks nice there and then, let's see. Maybe this guy, maybe I'll rotate him and this guy can go up here somewhere. How about maybe we put this guy here but let's reflect him so he's facing this way instead. Maybe I'll move him down a bit and rotate this. There we go. Maybe that'll work better. Then I just have these other elements here that are just fillers. What I'm going to do with them is that I'm probably going to use them to fill this hole area in here. But for now we're going to move them aside. Basically what happens is any artwork that is on this side of the board needs to be repeated on this side of the board. That's just the way Illustrator will recognize this as a pattern. So anything that overhangs on this side needs to also overhang on that side anything that overhangs on the top here needs to overhang on the bottom. In order to do that, we're going to select all of these and then go to object, transform, move. That brings up this pop-up box. We're going to move it horizontally. Remember, the dimensions of your box is 10, so you're going to move it 10 inches. You're going to hit "Preview" just so you can see that it's moving in the right direction. Then vertically you're not going to move it at all. That's very important, that you keep these dimensions the way they are. If you started off with an eight by eight inch square, then you want eight inch dimensions to work within here. My square here is going to be 10 inches by 10 inches, so I'm working with 10 inch dimensions. Horizontally, I want to move this 10 inches and I'm going to hit "Copy" instead of okay. If I hit "Okay", all that will happen is, it'll move it from here to here. I don't want to do that, I want to copy it and still keep the icons on this side as well. I'm going to hit "copy", so that takes effect. Now this is moved perfectly. Now as you can see, there's an overlap with this one so before I even try to move this one over, I'm going to just move it slightly just so I can fill this area better. Now I may even make these guys a little bigger. Perfect. Now we have the same thing here. These overhang, so I'm going to copy that object, transform, move. Now this time horizontally, we're not going anywhere. That's going to be a zero and vertically we're going to go to 10. That's going to give us a perfect copy down here. Click "Copy" and now you have that. This is the frame of your pattern. Now, we have to fill in the center here, so we can take some of these elements and fill in or we can also copy maybe this flower because it's a nice icon, it's pretty big, maybe we can repeat this one more time. Just make sure you hold down shift to not distort the constraints. This way, we have that. That looks good there. This guy looks fine there. This leaf is going to be a big help because we're going to be able to repeat it several times by holding down the option key and clicking. You can repeat this one a few times. Just make sure you tilt it around so it has just some flow and movement because you don't want it always facing the same way. Maybe we'll put him down here at one point. Maybe this guy can be repeated over here, maybe facing that way. We move this guy up a little bit. This guy over. This flower is going to be our saving grace because we'll be able to move it around and fill a larger area. This area down here, actually, I'd like to use something else that we may have. Maybe this guy can fill in this space here. Let's see. Rotate it so it'll fit better and maybe scale it as well. Then don't be afraid to change colors too. If you think this is too much because there's all this maroon here, maroon here, then by all means, ungroup it and change the color of it. Let's see, maybe we can give that this color, and that breaks that up a little bit better. This way we don't have all that maroon. Let's group it again once we're done changing it. There's an empty space here. I'm going to move one of these flowers into here. But what I'm going to do is change the color just to add a little bit of interest. Maybe the color of this one needs to be that. There we go. Maybe now we'll take this flower, let's group it. Hold that option, move it down here. Maybe let's repeat it up here. Maybe we have it again over here and we can scale it. Once we've scaled it, we can also put it here. We can add it here. I can see just from looking at this pattern, that these are going to be big voids. Let me actually copy it and leave a copy down here. I'm going to take this flower and I'm going to just make it a little larger just to fill this area here, and now I have to move that one all by itself. Object move, zero, 10 and copy. Now I have a copy there. Now you see how it's interfering a bit with this icon design that was already there, and that's okay. We're going to move it. In order for us to move it, we have to select them both and move them at the same time. Let's see how much we can move it without interfering with either icons. I could actually shift it to the left, shift it to the right, as long as I have both of them selected and I move them simultaneously. That is the same for all of your icons. If you need to make any adjustments here, you're going to have to select here, and make adjustments to all of these at the same time. As you can see, there is a little bit of play here for this, so I just want to make sure that you know that. I think that looks pretty good for now. I'm going to just zoom out for a minute. I think that looks pretty good. I think this guy here could probably be scaled a bit, so we can bring in another element in here, perhaps another flower that we change the color of. Let's ungroup that. Let's make this one quite possibly this pink, and the center could be all white. How's that? Perfect. I moved that one out of the way. That's good. Let's make another copy here of this one. Let's just make another copy and move this guy down here. You can play around with it all day. I mean, it really is up to you how busy you want your pattern or if you don't want it as busy. Sometimes you'll find little voids and you may want to fill them, you may like the negative space and leave it just the way it is. I tend to like things a little busier, so it's really a matter of preference. In the next lesson, we're going to go over how to convert this into a pattern. 6. Create your pattern: Now we're going to begin in the final step, assembling our pattern. If you remember, we created this rectangle box. We're going to select it, click "Edit," copy, and then Edit, paste in the back, and that's going to duplicate this box and put one identical behind it. But here is a very important step. That box needs to have no fill and no stroke. The reason is that box is going to tell Illustrator, well, everything around here is going to be constrained to that box. So the white box is just a shape, but that box behind it is the one who's going to tie everything together. That's what you always have to remember, is that last step. You'll notice, if you didn't take that step, if your pattern is cut off in certain areas and not repeating correctly. That's a very important step to remember. We're going to now select it all. Just click and drag. Once you have it all selected, you're going to drag it into your Swatches palette. So now your pattern is created in here. We're going to move a little bit off so we can test the pattern and see how it's repeating. So just click and drag any size rectangle you want. Now we're going to go to our Swatches palette and fill it. As you can see, it's a perfectly repeating pattern. I don't really see anything major that I need to change. Maybe this leaf here could be a little longer. So I'll find that here and see if I can just hold down shift, maybe make it a little longer. But then that becomes a problem with this guy, so maybe he needs to be a little smaller. Then you could just play around with this. You can get really tedious with this, that you want this to look a certain way. So you're just going to play around with it until all the pieces fit just the way you like them. Now you see by doing that, these fit correctly, but there's a little bit of a void here. Good thing I have my little filler flowers because these filler flowers are going to go and cover up some of these gaps that I may have. So that looks better. Now maybe this guy needs to be just a little bigger so it could fill more of that space. That looks good to me. Maybe this one. Just be a little bigger. Well, this guy moves down a little. Now I created a white space here. As you can see, this can go on for hours, where we're just filling and moving, and filling and moving spaces. Let's take and repeat this one in here. Because we didn't change anything on our overhanging icons, we don't really have to do anything else other than copy it again and drag it into our Swatches palette. You can actually delete the first one because we've made adjustments and we won't be using that. Then let's go back here and test it again. Perfect. Now it looks better. It's got a nice flow. There is a lot of nice movement in it. The leaves are going in different directions. Now, another way to test your pattern, because after you created it, you may think, well, I don't like large icons like this. You can go to Object, Transform, Scale. You're going to make sure preview is checked off, but you're going to uncheck transform objects because we're not going to transform the object which is the box. We're not going to transform that. We're actually going to transform the pattern. I've set it to 75 percent, so that now has reduced the pattern by 75 percent, and that looks good. But you can also hit Command D and reduce it yet another 75 percent, and again, you can see even better the movement in the patterns. This is a good way to test it. I actually like it at the first 75 percent that we set it at, so that works good for me. Now, another thing that I want you to play around with is, I'm going to copy this box and set it aside there. I'm going to actually copy the boxes again and put them down here, because now what I'm going to do is play around with the color. Now, I know I selected a palette and I don't generally stick to the palette. It's a very good starting point for me and I know I want to be in this family of colors. But after I've created it and I see the pattern and how it moves, there may be certain things that I don't like and color is always an easy fix. Here in this other document, I have some color palettes that I've already made, so I'm going to copy those and bring them into here, edit, paste. Then I'm just going to select them individually and create pattern swatches that I can use. Let's create another one there and lastly, perfect. Now I have other patterns swatches to play with. Here's the neat trick. We're going to go and select the box. Then the first pattern I'm going to play around with is this one. I'm going to click on this folder and that selects all of these colors. Then you go to Color Guide and this spinning wheel that says Edit or Apply Colors, I'm going to click on. That says to Illustrator that you want to use these colors and replace some of your existing colors with the new colors. So you're recoloring your artwork. Now, this I like already. This is a pretty color. If you go down here, you can randomly change the color order. It's just going to change the icons. Sometimes the leaves, sometimes some of the other ones. So you can just keep clicking on this until you find a nice, happy medium that works well with your pattern. We can do this all day because I'm sure you'll just find this to be as addicting as I do, that you can just change the color in just a simple click. Let's see. Then this button here, randomly changes the saturation. So if you click on that, something totally different happens. Now I'm really straying from the original color palette that I selected. It'll change the saturation as well. Now it's deeper, darker colors. I can do that one more time and it goes even darker. This is a really nifty tool. We don't have to go as dark, but I actually like the look of this one. I'm going to click okay and what happens is, it says, saves changes to the swatch group. You're going to click Yes. What that did was, it created this color palette in this pattern into your swatches. It automatically saved it in there. Now let's go to another one. Let's try maybe this color palette. I'm going to select the folder. I'm going to go back to Edit or Apply Colors. I like that one already, so I'm going to click "Okay," but I'll go back to it and see what else I can find. These are really pretty colors. I like this as well, so I'm going to click "Yes," and that saved that pattern there as well. Then we can just keep changing it. This is also very pretty. I can see that in the kid's pattern, and I love this one as well. So that's a good array for those colors. Let's do this last group here. It's got a nice navy in it, so this one should be interesting. I really love this orange, so I'm going to click "Okay," and save that one, and keep playing around with it. That's very pretty too. Let's save that one. I like that one too, but let's see. That one is really pretty. You can do this all day long, but as you can see, the original pattern has now evolved into all these different elements. Just by changing the color, it just changes the entire mood of the pattern. One more thing I just wanted to show you, and it's using the Pattern tool in Illustrator. So that we're going to cover in the next lesson. 7. Illustrator pattern tool : I just wanted to take a quick moment to show you the pattern tool in Illustrator. Because you may be wondering why go through all these steps just to create this pattern when the newer versions of Illustrator have a pattern built-in. I just want to show you that just like live trace, it's really not the most versatile tool. It doesn't allow for too much refinement. I'm just going to copy this three icons here for now and I'm going to move them over. We'll use this to create our pattern in Illustrator in using the pattern tool. I'm going to go to object, pattern, make, and I'm going to click ''OK'' here. As you can see, it automatically defaults to this grid pattern is just everything in a line, everything in a square. It does give you options. You can do break by row, which shifts every other row and then there's break by column, which puts everything in a column. Then there's hex by column. The hex by column is not terrible. It does fill in a lot of the white areas. A lot of the white space gets filled in. Let's say we select that. I'm going to click save a copy. It automatically is going to put it into my pattern swatches here. Click ''Done''. Then what happens is just, this is what we get as a result. It's pretty it'll work for a quick fix. But as you can see, the let me just zoom in as you can see. There are some areas where we would love to have put some other elements just for fill. To me, this doesn't give you a finished patterns. In this stage, you would have to think through maybe putting a little flower here, may be another element there, and then trying it again. It's not really allowing you to see where the pattern is going to evolve into. While, if you're working in the method that I showed you previously, you'll see that everything has to conform to that box. Then you can play around with moving your objects to where you want them. This way, everything just fits in perfectly. If you also notice here, it cut off the pattern for some odd reason, just right along here. That tends to happen a lot because it just places a bounding box somewhere in the middle here and it probably cut off everything down here. You really have to play around with it, if you're in a tight deadline and you have to just come up with a pattern real quick. It is a quick solution, but it's not really a refined tool that you can use for professional products. I just wanted to show you what that would look like. Just so you have it as an option because it is a tool and you have at your disposal. 8. Class project: So now, we're going to begin working on our project. I've selected a really fun project for this class. What we're going do is, we're going to Create a folder, No Card Set. In order for us to do that, I'm going to show you how to set up the document so you'd be able to print it at home or at a printing shop. This is going to be a great way to display your new patterns, to be able to write notes to family and friends. I love a handwritten note and I think a personalized stationery is just the perfect touch. So it's always nice to have some personalized note cards on-hand for thank you's and for just sweet notes. We're going to begin by creating a template. The document size that you're going to create is 5.5 by 8.5. This is the flat look of the actual printed card, the card is going to be folded in half and the finished size of it folded is going to be 4.25 by 5.5, which in the stationary industry it's a standard A2 folded card. You can find envelopes for your finished piece at any staples, or any office supplies store, any hobby, any craft store, you can find envelopes in any color pretty much anywhere now, and you can find great deals online as well. So let's get started. We're going to first figure out what our center line is just so we could visualize better. We're going to go to View, Rulers, and my Rulers are already displayed, so my option I have is Hide Rulers, but you would actually select on "Rulers". So as you can see here, the ruler show up on the top and on the side, so it allows you to drag a line either vertically or horizontally. We're going to drag a horizontal line because we're actually folding this document in the middle. So I'm just going to click here and drag, and as you can see, there's a dotted line that's following me. The halfway point for this 8.5 length is going to be 4.25, so right about there, I'm going to drop the line and as you can see, it's like this light teal colored guideline. Now, it's a simple process, we're going to go into our "Shapes Tools" here and grab the "Rectangle Tool". We're going to go to the corner and we can click and drag, or we can double-click and get this pop-up and enter the exact dimensions. So again, our document size is 5.5 and the height is 8.5, you can click, "Okay" and now we have that set right on top here. I'm going to go to our last document and I'm going to select one of these patterns that I want to use. I actually like the original one, the color is very pretty, so let's click, "Copy" and then once I bring it in here and "Paste" it, it's going to actually paste it into my swatches palette there. I saw that it's very large, so I'll just refresh your memory on how we can scale that down. As you can see, I actually like very large patterns like this, but let me just not show my exaggerated pattern, crazy side here. Let me just show you again how to transform it. So you're going to transform Scale, you're going to de-select "Transform Objects" and now it's at 75 percent. I actually love this large pattern this way, but I'm just going to show you how it'll look if we just make it a bit more into where you can appreciate the pattern more, so I actually like how that looks. Now, I'm just going to show you a design that I would make but feel free to just really go with it. Just bear in mind where your folding line is, you can create a square in the middle here with your name on it, you can Drag, obviously you'd want really correct measurements on here, but you can go in there and as a matter of fact, let me "Drag" this out so I can have a color swatch to work with. Let's just leave this guy out here for a minute just so you I can have some colors to work with. So let's "Select" that, you can go right here and then write your name just across there. I like the look of this if I just drag this out to the end here, 5.5, and then drag this out to the bottom, and then here, I'm going to just write my name, not even going to leave any spaces. There's a method to my madness, trust me. I'm going to scale this so it would fit. For this first one, I'm going to use one of my favorite fonts, District Pro Thin, it's a very thin font. Then for this one I'm going to use "Susie's Hands", and I actually need to scale that more, so let's just make that just a little bigger. So I'm actually going to Select one color for my name and a different color for my last name. I actually think that's too strong of color, let's see what the pink looks like, that's too light. Maybe we'll go back to what we had, there we go. Now, we can "Drag" out another line right here just for some color contrasts, we can make this into maybe this really dark burgundy just to break it up, and there you have it. That's actually going to make a really pretty unfolded stationary for you to use. Now, I'm also going to create a different color palette, so I'm just going to "Copy". Make sure your "De-select" the guideline, you don't want that selected when you're copying something, and let's "Paste". As you can see, it copied the guideline. So let's just "copy," there we are and I did it again. There we go. So now I have my center line there as well. Because I'm going to make a No-Card Set, I'm going to pull in one of the other pattern colors that I had. This one is very pretty too, it will look really pretty in a stationary set, so let's do "Edit" "Paste", let's "Delete" that, now let's set it here, that's actually very pretty. It's identifying these colors as part of that. I think I like the green that's in there, so I'm just going to pull it out and scale it. Scale it one more time so it doesn't interfere with anything and then here I'm going to "Apply" this color, that's actually very pretty. Let's do a contrasting color and maybe this one. Let's change this may be into this dark green, let's see how that shows up. I actually like how that looks. So you can go ahead and create a whole set of stationary cards, you can do a set of two or a set of four. So that's it, that's your finished projects. I'm looking forward to seeing everybody's work, please make sure to print out your cards, and take pictures of them, and share them. If you get stuck anywhere in the process, make sure to reach out to me through the classroom. I will check in daily to make sure to check on everyone's progress, see everyone's projects, and to see if anybody needs help. Make sure to post any questions that you may have. Thank you again for taking my class and I can't wait to see what you guys come up with.