Transcripts
1. Intro: Hello, I'm Mel Armstrong. I am a surface pattern designer and illustrator in New Zealand. Lately I've been creating dozens of jungle inspired patterns and illustrations. Most recently I created 10 illustrations that will be used as craft scratch cards for kids for a French company. The company loved them so much that they asked me to do two more sets with different things. It made me realize that the jungle thing really is still hanging around. It's still very popular. This class follows on from my previous fundamentals class. I'm going to take you through from start to finish, my process for creating a pattern collection using Adobe Illustrator. Using the brief jungle animals, you can follow along with me and create your own jungle animal collection in your style for your portfolio. Let's get started.
2. Inspiration: The first step in this process is doing your research and gathering inspiration. The first thing I did was research what a jungle actually was. A jungle is a land covered with dense vegetation, dominated by trees. There are jungles all over the world in warm climates typically near the equator. The next thing I did was researched the plants that grow in the jungle, and this is what I found. The jungle is full of palms, giant leaves, rivers, vines, ferns, and little trees that grow on other trees. I then researched the type of animals that live in the jungle. This kind of depends on where the general is. But this is what I came up with. Monkeys, toucans, cobras, sloths, tigers, leopards, jaguars, butterflies, elephants, you get the picture. I then put together a mood board of all these various items. You can do this in Pinterest or you can create a document in Illustrator like I've done here, and just drag some photos into it.
3. Sketching: [MUSIC] For this brief, I'm going to select two or three animals and a bunch of leaves and vines to draw. My drawing is a rough and simple. I leave all the work for later, when I get into Illustrator to add embellishments and data. These days I use procreate or my iPad to sketch.Obviously good old pencil and paper is fine. The reason I use procreate, is I find it easier no my, arthritic hands and I'll like to save paper. I've got two young kids who loved to draw, and my goodness we waste a lot of paper. So, I like to save as much as I can. And by drawing on the iPad, it's also easier to just a droplet across to my Mac and into an illustrator. I don't have to scan it. But if you asked taking to a traditional paper and pencil,all you need to do is scan it in and we'll take a simple photo on your smartphone and send it to yourself and then you can open it up in Illustrator.[MUSIC].
4. Colouring Icons/Motifs: I have all my sketches in Illustrator now. I'm going to show you some ways that I color my icons in. In my previous fundamentals class, I showed a few little techniques. The drawing inside tool, drawing behind tool and some brushes. In this class, I'm going to show you how to use the shape builder tool, which is fantastic. I love it. I use it probably more now than I use the drawing inside tool to create some really cool shapes. I think I'm going to start with this toucan so that I can actually show you that shape building tool. I'm going to create a new document. I'm just going to create a 10 by 10 inch, 300 TPI. There we go. You may notice, I have up in the right-hand corner here, a palette, a swatch palette. These are the colors that I use all the time and I created that. I have it persistent so that it opens up in my Illustrator every time I create a new document. I might quickly show you how to use that because that's really handy. Normally when you open up a new document, you have this swatch pedal, which is the default. Like most people, I don't use any of those colors and I'm always going into the swatches, going to user defined and then picking my swatch and putting in there. But having it there already just makes it a little bit easier. So to do that, when you've got a document open, if you go to user defined and you select a swatch that you've already saved. Let's go to this one. If you go to that right-hand menu and select persistent, and then put it somewhere. You can either put it on the side there, you can put it up in here. You can put it wherever you like. But it will now have that persistent on. When you open a new document, let me just put that back in there. Let's close that down, and do a new document. Still the same again. You can see it's there, makes life a little bit easier for you. I'm going to get rid of that one because I don't actually needed now. Go back to my original swatch with the colors that I tend to use all the time. I'm going to bring it across the toucan, and I'm just going to grab it, drag it, and drop it. I'm going to make it a bit bigger. Doesn't matter about the quality here. This is just a sketch that I'm going to draw over. I used to bring my sketches and then use the image trace to convert them. But then I got a wake wacom cintiq and discovered that I could draw on that just as well as I could draw on paper, if not better. I like to redraw it with my wacom over the top of my sketch. It doesn't matter either way, whatever your preference is, but I no longer use the image trace. I've got that one layer when you cool that sketch. I'm going to create a new layer and drag it underneath the sketch and call this toucan. Now, on the sketch, l am going to select that, go to transparency. If you don't see it, just go up to window and select transparency. I'm going to change that to multiply, and I'm going to bring down the opacity so that it's just there and I'm going to lock that layer. I'm going to grab the blue, that navy, that's going to be the place of my toucan. I go to my brushes. I'm just going to bring in some brushes that I've created. I explained how to do this in my first fundamentals class if you're interested. I've created a handful of brushes that I use all the time. I just want to add them to my brushes panel. I'm going to hit shift B to get to my blob tool. I'm just going to trace around the main area of the toucan. I'm now going to remove the inner to make it one full shape. I'm just going to select A on the keyboard to select the direct selection tool, and then select the inside. So if I zoom in, you can see I've just selected the inside and then I hit delete, and that will wave the inside so you've got a full shape there. Now I'm going to do this face part in a lighter color. Now, I used to use this tool down here called draw inside or draw behind. What I would do is select what I want to draw inside then go down here, select draw inside. But by using the shape builder tool, we don't need to do that. I'm going to select my color, hit shift B on the keyboard to use my blob. Then I'm just going to do a straight over the shape here. Doesn't matter if we go outside, remove the inside of it. Let's just zoom in a bit so you can see. Now, you can see that it's gone outside of the shape and we want it to be within the shape. What you do is select both shapes, and then over here, there is the shape building tool. Which is shift in on your keyboard. Then, say if you hover your mouse over, it will select different parts of your two shapes. I want to remove this part here. So you can see here, the cursor's got a plus sign, I actually want to remove it. If I hold down option, it changes it to a minus. If I were to click it with the plus, it would add that shape, if I use it with the minus and click, it removes it. Now you have the shape cut to the main shape, which is a really handy tool. It's really fast and quick to do. Let's do another bit down here. Toucan has a bit of red underneath his tail here. I'm going to use my red and I'm just going to paint that on it. That's fine. You remove the inside, then grab both of those. Shift M to select the shape builder tool. Holding down the option, I can remove those two edges and so forth. I'm going to move on to the beak. I need to paint some colors onto the beak. So on the far right, I just want a little bit of a black outline, I'm just going to paint over the top. I'm done. Then if I select the two beaks plus the black, zoom in a bit using my shape buildup tool, I can remove things that I don't want like that. Just hide our sketch for the moment. You can see how lovely that shape has been built without much difficulty. Going to add another bit in here. See what the blob tool, if you need to add to something you've already done, it just joins it all up automatically so you don't have to worry about merging them all. It's my favorite thing about the blob tool. Let's remove those bits. I'm thinking I might put these little black bits on the end at the front. I'm going to select them, I'm going to hold down shift command and the right square bracket to bring them to the front. Now he's starting to look like a toucan. Need to do it inside of the beak here. So for this, I'm actually going to use the draw behind tool, darker red. I'm going to use the red that I already have. I'm going to go to the color guide and just use one shade darker. See how that just pops up behind like that. I do want it in front of that body area. I'm just going to go command, select the [inaudible] command right square bracket and bring it forward. Looks a bit better. I'm just going to group that bottom beak with all the shapes. I'm selecting them all. I'm going to hit "Command G". I'm just going to move them up slightly. Then the top, I'm going to group them as well and just move them down slightly just so that they join. I'm going to fix this a little bit up here where it's got a little lump on its head. To do that, I'm going to use the pen minus 2. I just hit minus on the keyboard and then I can just remove anchor points and then change it to the direct selection tool and just straighten it out those points. I might fix this up as well. A I made it. It looks better, all right? Into his eye now, select to blue for the back of the eye. I'm going to use the Eclipse tool for this because I want a perfect circle. I'm going to use the command left square bracket this time just to move it behind that beak. Then I want another circle on top and one more will be added for the eye. I had a feeling what [inaudible] they draw behind I do. It keeps putting it at the back. But that's okay. I didn't want to just give it a bit of highlight. I am going to select a light color and not white, but almost white. Okay, we're getting there. I'm just going to add a few little lines to indicate his wings and his tail. It's making it very simple, not too complicated. I also want to add a little bit of detail up here and we need to add the branch that he's on. We're going to worry too much about the end because I will most likely cover that in my pattern with some sort of leaf or branch. Just going to make that a bit smaller by grabbing those anchor points and just dragging it down. Now we also need to get, I want the beak in front of the branch up here. So, I'm going to grab the beak. I'm going to group it and I'm going to command shift right bracket to put it in the front. Now, we need some claws. That's what I'm going to do for the moment. I'll probably add little bit more detail to the branch later on, but I will wait until I've done the other animals and make them all very similar. Let's move on. I'm going to select all of that and group it, Command G and will move him to the side. All right. Let's move on. I will do this [inaudible] Now feel free to skip the rest of this. I'm going to speed it up so you don't get too bored. [MUSIC].
5. Hero pattern: My favorite part, creating a pattern. Before we jump into creating a pattern, I'm just going to talk about the different repeat types. You have your basic straight repeat. In this example, I have got my [inaudible]. In a straight repeat, your images form a grid following the horizontal and vertical lines. A pretty basic straight repeat. In a brick repeat, the images are moved halfway horizontally to the next image. You can see here that just moved across halfway from the image on top. The half drop repeat is the same as the brick repeat except it goes vertically. The [inaudible] has dropped down halfway to the previous image and then you've got your random tossed design where images are randomly placed with no discernible pattern. I tend to do a combination of a random toss in half drop repeat. I draw the half drop repeat in both Photoshop and Illustrator, and I'm going to show you again how to create a half drop repeat in Illustrator using a random tossed design so it's a bit of a combination of both. Let's create a new document and I'm going to create a document that's 10 by 10 and 300 dpi, that's 10 by 10 inches. Now, I'm going to set this up. I'm going to create a few layers over here. My first layer is going to be a guide and it's going to drag this, it can lay underneath and call that Guide and then create another layer called Pattern. On the Guide layer, create a rectangle. Select the rectangle tool and click and you want a rectangle that's five inches wide by 10 inches high. It's basically half the width of your artboard and the whole height. Then to align it, select the Align panel. If you don't see it, just go to window and select Align. Make sure that align to artboard is selected, and select Align objects horizontally Align left and horizontally align top. That will put it in that top left hand corner nice and snug within the square and then I'm going to lock that. I'm going to use that as a guide to create my half drop repeat, so I will put all my pattern in here and then what if it is in the side or half dropped down over this side. Then I'm going to create a background square. This one is going to be 10 by 10. If I click in there and select 10 by 10, I'm just going to select a dark color for this one, make sure the fill is selected, and then once again align it to the left hand top. I just realized my guide has a fill, so I want to get back up to my guide, select it, click on the fill and select No Fill. We just want to say the lines and because I've got a dark background, I might change the outline to white and then we can see it better. Then I'm going to lock that and then also I'm going to lock my background layer. Now, we can begin our patterns. I'm going to grab my icons and I'm going to drag them over into my pattern file, reduce the size a bit. I'm going to start laying out my pattern. It's all going to be within this left hand side. Now, the same thing applies with a simple repeat everything on the top must repeat on the bottom, and everything on the left will repeat on the right. Just keep that in mind when you're creating your pattern. We're getting close to filling the side with the main elements. Now. I have copied the top elements icons down to the bottom and I've added a couple here so I need to make sure that they repeat on the top and the bottom. I'm going to get rid of these three that I know are already at the top and grab these two and by holding down Shift, Command, M, it brings up the Move tool. Now, I want to move it zero horizontally and minus the height, which is 10 inches, to move it up there. I'm not going to copy, I'm going to move it so everything's at the top. Then I'm going to select one of these and move them down. This time I want to select copy, so they stay at the top and the bottom. I've got most of the main elements on here. Now, before I use these to fill my gaps, as most of my patterns are quite busy and I like to fill all the gaps, I actually want to make sure that the half drop repeat is going to work first so often when you do it this way and you move your block across and down half, you may need to adjust things and I found it easy before I add any texture type elements or smaller filler elements, I like to check that this is all working first. What I'm going to do is I'm actually going to get rid of all those bottom elements because we don't need them for this, and I'm going to select all of those and I'm going to group them. You could right-click Group or Command J. Then I'm going to select them again and I'm going to move them, so Shift, Command, M, and this time I'm going to go horizontal, five inches, vertical, five inches, and I'm going to copy. That moved it across a half drop. Now, I just want to check and make sure that everything looks okay and it's not crossing over anywhere. I'm going to leave that, I think that's fine. I'm going to check the top area here, so i want to select this group. I'm going to go "command shift M", horizontal zero, and then minus 10 inches and copy. I'm going to actually delete those now and I'm going to start filling in with my textures and Philae elements, I call them. I will speed this one up. We're getting really close. I'm going to test out my half drop and repeat again so I'm just going to remove the bottom section and group my passion, and then I'm going to move every five inches across and five inches down and copy. See we need to make some adjustments here, which is fine so I'm just going to ungroup my first group and just move a few of these around. I'm just going to move this group up the top to see if I need to make some further adjustments. That will be a minus 10 vertical copy and let's fix these bits in here. I think we are getting close, so I'm going to remove those, regroup this bit and move it five across five down. As you can see, it's a bit of trial and error to get it right. Spending the time doing this, it creates a pattern that is very complex and seamless so It's very hard to see where that repeat will be. We need to make sure that everything on the top matches everything on the bottom and everything on the left matches everything on the right. It can get a bit tricky this. The first thing I do is anything that's overlapping on the right here, I'm going to move across to the left and then I'm going to copy everything on the left back over to the right. Usually there's only a couple of things that I need to move. I will ungroup everything. These two here, I'm just going to move them minus 10 and 0 vertically. I'm actually going to move them, not copy them, because i will move them back. As you can see here, we need to just move that to the front. I'm just going to get rid of some of these at the top here. We don't need them. Likewise at the bottom or at my right sided icons. I might actually move my top down to the bottom here first. That right side top and bottom is correct. We don't need to change anything there but my left side, I do. We just move it down 10 and copy it. At the top and the bottom, and now we just need to get the left and the right side. I'm going to select over left, slight shift command M, move it 10 across zero down and copy. Now we go and look for little things that need to be fixed. What should we look for in a composition is to see if anything is lining up when it shouldn't be. At the moment I'm pretty happy with that if there's any holes, I can see a hole in the middle here. Might turn off my guide. You can see a hole in the middle here. Actually there's a bit of a line up here as well that we could fix. There's a few places where I just need to adjust what is in the front and what's in the back so this sloth here needs to be move back behind the toucan. This is just clean up time. I'm first going to try to fix this line up and hole. Now we are going to test our pattern. I'm going to unlock the background layer and I'm actually going to move it up into my pattern layer. I'm then going to create another square, 10 by 10 inches. This one is going to have no fill, no stroke. Align it to the left and top, and then send it to the back. Make sure its in that pattern layer and then going to grab everything, pull it up into the swatches panel, create another rectangle and fill it. There it is. Very complex. Half dropped repeat pattern. The next lesson I'm going to show you how to create some simple coordinates. In this case, I'm going to show you how to use the pattern tool in Illustrator. See you then.
6. Coordinates: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to use illustrators pattern tool to create some simple coordinates for your pattern collection. I'm going to create a new file, I'm going to make it 10 by 10 inches and 300 dpi. I'm going to grab one element from my hero pattern. I'm just going to drag that over and make it bigger. I just want to make a simple pattern with just one element. What I'm going to do, I'm going to create a half-tile per page using the pattern tool. If I select that icon, go up to object, pattern make. You'll get this popup box set in saying that your new pattern has been added to the swatch panel that you can use it later. I'd start with it, puts it in a nice grid. I want to create a half-tile per page. What I'm going to choose is brick by column, and see how that drops it down by one-half. You can actually change the offset. You could actually have it dropped down by one-third or one-quarter. That would be one- quarter dropped repeat, or you could have a two-third drop repeat. But I'm going to stick to the one-half, the half-tile per page and that creates a pretty simple but effective. Apparently, you can use as a coordinate. How quickly did I make that? Once I'm happy with that, I am going to save and close. We can give this a name. It's going to say coordinate one, and it's added to my swatch panel, and click "Done" to get out of there. Now, I can actually remove that now. Pattern isn't here now you're probably wondering, how do I extract that and how do I save it as a [inaudible] that you could upload it to say, print on demand website. The easiest way to do that is to grab it, pull it out and you will see there is a bounding box. Using the direct selection tool on your keyboard, we're going to select that and then you go up to object artboards, fit to selected art. Now, we've got repeating tiles. If you were to extract that, that would be your repeating tile. Now, I actually want to put background or try few backgrounds with this. I'm going to double-click in here because it's grouped and select that bounding box and I'm going to go to my swatch panel. Let's see, got a dark blue. [inaudible]. Let's do that one. Now you can test out your pattern as well. Exit out of that, Ungroup. I'm going to select the background, duplicate it, select the background that's at the very back, and take off the fill. Make sure it has no stroke as well. You can then drag that. I need to be on the swatches panel. You weren't actually let you drag it on to a safe. Just thought. I'm going to drag this one to here and then test it out. Then you can see that the pattern is working and might just adjust the scale. We're going to right-click, select transform then scale. Turn the transform objects off, and let's put it down at 31 percent. You can see that that repeats nicely. Look at that. There you have it. If I was to just export that, if you make sure when you exporting that you select, use artboards only. Save it as a JPEG or whatever you want and that will save your tile that you could then upload to Spoonflower or any other Print on Demand website that needs a repeating pattern. I'm going to make another simple coordinate. I'm going to create another 10 by 10, 300 dpi document. We're going to go back to my [inaudible] and I'm going to grab this one. Let's make it a bit bigger, duplicate that and I'm going to flip it, turn it around a bit. Let's see what we can do with this. I'm going to select then go to objects, pattern make. I'm so [inaudible] a bit so I can see already creates quite a less pattern. We're going to play around with this I think hex by row will not work quite honestly it does overlap. Let's [inaudible] go hex by column. Now, we have brick by row. It's quite nice. It's just a matter of playing around with it. You can even once you're in here, adjust it. Now you set up and you around and you can see everything else adjusts as you go. I call out that. I'm going to save that one. Let's test it out. Transform the scale to make sure, and there you go. It's a really nice pattern coordinate. That was very simple to make. Once again, I am going to create a tile that I can extract as well. I pull that out. We'll get rid of these originals. There it is and then go to object artboards fit to selected art. Mostly, I'm thinking about changing the color for this one. To do that, I'm going to go over to my saved pallet. I'm going to select using the direct selection tool and then once I've got one selected if I go come out it will select everything with the same fill. I can then just select a different color, the pink, and then I want to change the inside strokes as well. I also want to change the background. I'm going to just create a duplicate of that bounding box. One of them can be the bounding box, one of them can be the background, and select a different color. We'll leave that one there. Have a [inaudible] and see how you go creating some basic coordinates. Next up, I'm going to show you how to create a presentation sheet as well as a collection swatch. See you then.
7. Puppet Warp & Global Edit Tools: In this lesson, I'm going to show you one of my favorite tools in Illustrator, the Puppet Warp tool. Here is a coordinate for my pattern collection that I've created. You can see in this pattern, I have bent some of my icons to fit nicely. In my original pattern, you can see those icons were just the same, they're all up and down. I wrote them across and they are all bent to fit nicely and keep the flow of the pattern. To do that, I will show you, I want to put this one in here but it doesn't quite fit. If I zoom in, select it. Go over to the Puppet Warp tool, which is in with the Free Transform tool. You can then, put pins on your icon, and wherever you've got a pin you can click and drag. See how I can bend that? With this, I'm going to make it fit nicer in this space. This is a great way to manipulate your icon so that they don't all look the same and they fit nicely in your pattern to keep a nice flow going, might bend this one a bit as well. Just slightly, you don't want to over-exaggerate it because it will lose the quality of the icon that you drew in the first place. It's just good for not nudging it into a nice position. I'm going to keep going with this pattern. I'm going to speed up this pattern and complete it and then show you the Global Edit tool. This is very new. It's in the latest release of Adobe Creative Cloud, so you'd need to download the latest release. But it's pretty cool. If I select an object, at the moment, I'm thinking I might change the color of these red leaves. Suppose select one. Because the object itself has objects within it as well, so it's got some inner detail on them. If I was to select them and select "Same", "Appearance". It's going to select everything, or if I go to select "Same", "Fill color", it's not going to be able to select all of those because of this inner data. With the new Global Edit, if I want to select that, go up to Select, Start Global Edit. You can see it's selected. They are the same now. This one, I manipulate it slightly to fit into that space, so it's not selected it, but generally it will select all of them. If you double-click in it and go in, I'm going change them all to blue, and you can see they all change. I'm going to undo that because I don't want that blue. I think I'm going to change it. Let's try the green, so I'm just going to have to do this one manually, which is fine and easily changed that. I just found the red was a bit overwhelming. That's an awesome new tool that you can use to select objects that are similar and do edits. You can also manipulate their size, their rotation, and that will apply to all of those global objects that are selected.
8. Presenting your collection: So in this lesson, I'm going to show you a few things I do with my collections to keep them altogether. I put them into a presentation sheet and I also like to save them as a Swatch in Illustrator. Firstly, let's create a new document. I'm going to go to "File", "New". For this, I'm going to create a landscape. I'm going keep it as [inaudible] for this purpose because I'm not sure what I'm going to use it and use it for in the end. Let's create that. Okay. Now firstly, I want to create a layout for all my patterns in this collection. So what I find is the easiest way is to create a swatch with all my colors plus all my patterns. I'm going to go back to my hero patterns, I'm going to go to swatches. I'm going to remove this swatch and then I am going to bring in my colors. I've got them already up here. I'm just going to add them to the swatch panel and then going to drag my pattern in and I'm going to say that, we're going to call it jungle. Now I'm going to go to my coordinates. I'll go to coordinate one. I'm going to bring up my jungle pellet, which you can see has the one pattern, just make them larger so you can see. I got my colors and my hero pattern. What I need to do is I need to add them to the swatch panel. I'm going to get rid of what's there. I'm going to add the colors, add the ones we already had in the new swatch and then I'm going to save it and it's jungle and it would just overwrite the existing one with the extra pattern on there. I'm just going to do that for each coordinate. It may seem a bit extensive but it actually ends up being great in the end because I've got them all together. Now my presentation shaped, I'm going to remove the default swatch and then I'm going to bring in my jungle swatch with all my patterns. Now I'm going to create a presentation sheet. It is up to you how you do this. Per [inaudible] , I like to put one large hero, that pretty much takes up half of the spot, half of the space. I'm going to change that to my hero and I'm going to remove the outline. I've made it bigger than my outboard. It will get chopped off when you save it. You can obviously line it up. If you do resize these books is you do need to reset your pattern, if you've done it without holding the dimensions. If I was to shorten that, you can see it gets squished up but if you were to click on the swatch, it will reset it. Then if I stretch it out again, it will stretch. I then I want to put two squares in here, four squares for our coordinates. Am going to make them not big. Am not going to worry about what's near at the moment because I just want to make sure that I've got the right sizes and two more underneath. So now we can fill each of those with our coordinates. I'm going to keep that, the monkeys that can be the sloths. Obviously, they are way too big at the moment but let me fix that. If you right-click on them, select "Transform" and "Scale", turn-off transform objects then and that one's being resized quite nicely and you can obviously change it up or down by adjusting the uniform box. I think about 35 percent was good, maybe 30. Let's try the next one. Always defaults to whatever you use last, so I'm going to keep that there. Am going to chip bump that up a bit. Am actually, just hitting the arrow keys on my keyboard. Am not going to be able to see these guys but [inaudible] see the pattern and these ones can be small. I'm thinking, I'm going to adjust this. I do this a lot, I play around until I like it. I've just resize them and I'm going to make this one liner, reset it and then we're going to put a logo down here [inaudible] just going to drag it in from there and we put that in there and then have a presentation shape that you can print out. We'll put on your website. The good thing about this is all your patterns are saved in this file, so if for any reason you lose one of the coordinates or the hero patterns files, you can use this presentation file.
9. Project: Thank you so much for following along with me. I can't wait to see your jungle animal collections. Please upload them to the projects section. Include your mood board, sketches, colored icons, and final pattern collection. If you can or if you want to, you can include a mock-up and a different colorway. If you're sharing on social media, please tag me MelArmstrongSkillshare so I can see your beautiful work. Now, if you have any questions please post in the community section and I will try and get back to you as soon as possible. If you liked this class, please give me a thumbs up so I can continue to bring you more classes like this. Happy pattern making. See you later. Bye.
Mel Armstrong, Illustrator, Pattern Addict & Teacher
