Surface Pattern Design Fundamentals

1. Hello!: Hello and welcome to my class, surface pattern design fundamentals. My name is Mel and I'm an illustrator and surface pattern designer based out of Australia and now New Zealand. I've licensed my illustrations and patterns to a variety of companies all over the world. I've been asked by my students many times how I've created my icons like going into my patents. So I thought I'd been answered that question. In this class. I'm going to take you step by step through just one of my methods for creating patterns in Adobe Illustrator. Some of the things we will cover include; how to find inspiration, sketching out ideas, creating illustrator brushes, transforming the sketches into icons in illustrator, and creating simple patterns. The project for this class is to create a simple pattern using the skills that I've taught you. I look forward to seeing what you come up with. Let's get started. 2. 1 - Inspiration: Inspiration is everywhere, my partner tells me I'm addicted to the phone because I've always got it only and always got it ready to take photos. I have a pretty busy life with work into kids, and so I need to take advantage of every moment and every source of inspiration. At morning in the front yard with the kids, I might find a new flower its new textures, new patterns and I like to have my phone there and my sketchbook ready to capture that inspiration. Inspiration is everywhere, so we will always be prepared to sketch it or photograph it, so you can use it later for a project. For this class is project I want you to get outside and take photos of flowers, and if you can birds. We will then use these photos to create a mood board for your design. You can also look at my Pinterest boards to add to your collection if you like. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to create a mood board from all of these images. 3. 2 - Moodboard: The Mood Board, also known as an inspiration board, is a collection of assets that eventually evolved into a style guide. It's purpose is to help formulate a mood for your design project. A Mood Board will help you establish a baseline that will eventually guide your design development. It will help you establish colors, mood, icons, and layout. It will also save you a lot of time. You can create a Mood Board on your computer using a program such as Illustrator or Photoshop. You can use an online tool, just Google create Mood Board, and you'll discover heaps of online tools, or you can create a paper version on your wall or on your desk. I generally create mine in Illustrator, then print it out, so it's always in front to me during the whole design process. In the resource's section, I've actually uploaded and illustrated the template that you can use, and I'm going to show you how I use that to create my Mood Board. Here are my photos and images that I would like to put into my Mood Board for my design. To create a Mood Board, I already have a template, which you can use yourself, or you can just create whatever you like. It doesn't really matter. My template is called, Mood Board square. It's just a square template and it's available for you to download. You just need to save it into your templates folder, which is generally under applications. This is if you're on a Mac, of course, Adobe Illustrator, Cool Extras, en_US and then Templates. You can actually just put it anywhere, and then when you come into file, you can navigate to wherever it is to create it. So if I just click on that one and click "New", I have a template here that's got a layout that I like to use. I'm going to create another layer and drag that to the bottom, and keep my guides on top. I'm going to go back here and select all of these and make sure that we're okay. Select all of these and drag them over onto my Mood Board, zoom out a bit, and I'll put them here. I'm just going to play around with the positioning. I'm thinking that probably the perfect size for that and it is, pretty much. The bird might go nicely in there. I just realized all these are on my guides layer. Let's get them off. We're going to select them all, "Command" "X" to cut, and select my other layer and paste. I can rename this one to images. That way, I know where I am. Let's try that again. Put that over here. I am going to clip these, which is why I've got these guides. I'm just going to drag it till I get it in there, I suppose. I'm just going to turn off my snap too, because it's snapping. Guess what? I don't want it. I want to be able to put it wherever I like. Split that one up there, so it fits so nicely. I think that one will look good there. [inaudible] I think that one clear there. Basically, you just move them around until you can find a spot for them. This spot over here is where I want put my colors, so I'm leaving that blank at the moment. I think I'm missing one. Lets go back. Yes, my [inaudible]. Extraordinaire can go down here. This one, I'm going to put here, is going to be in that little circle. It's going to make it a little bit smaller. To do that, I'm going to select it, hit "E" on the keyboard, hold down my "Shift" key and just drag it to make a little bit smaller. Not to small, because I still want it to fit. Now it's looking a bit all over the place at the moment, but I'm going to clip these, so they fit nicely. With this one, I'm going to select the square guide and a photo. Right-click and then make a clipping mask. Same with my cycle and the pattern that I want to go in there. It looks good. Don't need to clip that one, it's already in there. Let's do this one. We get rid of that square and any other ones that I don't want. Also, we're going to put another circle behind that to give it an outline. If I use the Eclipse tool, hold down the "Shift" key and drag, and then fill that with white. I'm going to send it back one layer. The way I did with that was "Command" "Left square bracket", or you can right-click, arrange and then send backwards. Now, you can eyeball this, so you think it's aligned properly, but to make sure that these two are aligned properly, I'm going to select them both, brought to align. Make sure "Align to Selection" is selected and then center, horizontally and vertically. [inaudible] might be because of the [inaudible]. That looks all right like that. That squared error is going to be the title. I was give my Mood Board a title, and here is going to be my colors. This image here of the shirt, I'm loving the colors, so I'm going to pick some of those colors for my Mood Board. To do that, I'm going to use the Rectangle tool. I'm going to create a square or a rectangle here, and I'm going to use the Eyedropper tool to select a color from that shirt. Lets put gray in there. If I select that, so make sure you're on the Selection tool, which is V on the keyboard, and then hold down the Option key and the Shift key. You can drag it and copy it. Now, I want quite a few squares, so if I do "Command" "D", it will copy my last action and put paste a few more squares. We want to get some more colors. I'm going to select same "Command", go back to my Eyedropper tool and select a color, and then to select the next one without losing the eyedropper, if you just select "Command", click, then it goes back to Eyedropper, so quick way of grabbing colors. I'm just going to grab a few of these. I'm just going to align these a bit better, so if I select them all and hit E on the keyboard, and then I'm going to hold down the Shift and drag it, so it's just in line with that, that will resize all of them nicely. This square here, I'm going to, first remind, I'll show you how to add these colors to use what's for. Select them all. Go over to your Swatches panel, if you can't see it, go to "Window", "Swatches", and click on the new color group, and then we'll give this a name. I'm going to call this Spring Wren. You can always change the name later. That will add that to your Swatches panel. Now, to save that for later, you need to go to this icon at the bottom left-hand corner called the Swatches Library menu, and select, say, Swatches. You can save it in your Swatches panel library. I'm going to give this a title and we're almost done. Make it black and then remove the strike. That's right. Title, Spring Wren figure. Change the font. Let's put my name on it. There we go. There is our Mood Board. One other thing before, because we've got a font on here, I always right-click and create outlines, so you don't have any issues if you're going to upload it onto the web or anywhere. I think that might actually still have a black outline here. Lets go to that. Actually, let's [inaudible] another one here. I'm going to save it for web, because for your project, you'll be creating a Mood Board, and to upload it to the project's area, you need to save it for web, so it's not too big. To do that go to "File", "Export", "Save for web". You'll also do "Save for screens". This is an illustrated cc. This will automatically save it as a 72 dpi, so it's perfect for the web, not too big. There it is. That's your Mood Board. 4. 3 - Sketching: The next step in my process is to sketch out my ideas, I do this a couple of ways. Using my breadboard as inspiration. I use my sketchbook to draw a rough sketches of my ideas. I also sometimes sketch directly onto my computer using a drawing tablet. I do this in Photoshop using what are called Webster's pencil brushes. As you can see, my sketches are very rough. There are really only ideas that I bring to life in Illustrator. The next step is to scan them into your computer. You can either use a scanner or find search a scanner paleo. 5. 4 - Brushes part 1: In this lesson, I'm going to talk about illustrated brushes. All of these icons that you see were created using custom brushes. Creating custom brushes and illustrator allows you to create smoother lines that really mimic real life brushes that will really enhance the look and feel of your work and they have a lot of fun to create. I'll be showing you how I created these icons later. But first, I want to talk about the different types of brushes and how to create them. There are five types of brushes that you can create. Calligraphic brush, allows you to create a stroke with varying stroke width, similar to a calligraphy pen. It's great for brushing lettering. But I also use these brushes a lot for drawing flowers and leaves. The art brush is the most fun to work with. It can turn a plane vector drawing into something that looks more handmade. There's so many options. I often use customer brushes to draw branches and leaves. The scatter brush allows you to scatter selected out work across a path or shape. You can adjust the way it randomizes and the spacing between each of the icons on the path. They are great for creating texture and backgrounds with pattern design. You can create scatter brushes from any type of that work. I like to create leaves, grass, dots for flowers, as well as texture using scanned in photos or media such as this pencil texture. The bristle brush simulates natural crystals of a physical brush. It basically mimics the look and feel of a paintbrush. I do not actually use this one. It illustrated because I prefer the brushes in Photoshop getting this effects are not going to talk about this one too much. The pattern brush can be quite complicated but can return some really cool results. It allows you to use five to find patterns to one brush and then distribute them along the path, such as circles or squares or just a line. You can create really complicated mentors with just a few icons or you can create frames anything really. I don't use this pattern brush when I create pattern designs and illustrated, but I do use it for other work. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to create art brushes and calligraphic brushes as the ones that I use a lot in my pattern creations. So I'll see you there. 6. 5 - Brushes part 2: Let's start with the brush and we're going to create a brush that will allow you to create this artwork, like tree branches that thing. First thing you need to do is create a very tall slim triangle. The way I would do that is I use the pen tool. You can select pay on your keyboard would've just like the pen tools and then we're going to create a very tall triangle, and make sure connect it up. Now what we need to do is, let's drag that onto the brushes board and then select art brush. In the art brush options, box, we will give it a name I'm going to call it branch. I'm going to change the width to pressure because I'm using a tablet. If you don't have a tablet and if you're using your mouse, then you should probably leave it unfixed. I'm going to change the scale to proportionately. Then the last thing you need to do is change the colorization to hue shift so that you can then change the color to whatever you like and then press "Okay". So we can remove that one there and if I select B on my keyboard or select the brush tool, I can now use this brush to create branch like images. What I might do, I'll create a tree and I'll show you how it works. Let's just create the trunk and I'm going to make this bit smaller so that l can just adjust the stroke. Let's make that one on 0.5, change that one to 0.25. Very quick and easy to create a tree with this brush. Because I'm using a tablet, its some determining the size of width from the pressure. When I'm doing it really lightly It doesn't do it as big and you can adjust your precious settings in your tablet set up. Quite often I would change them while I'm designing as well to suit whatever I'm doing. I'll just leave that there, looks like a tree blowing in the wind really doesn't it? Then to finalize that, I would actually select it all, go to object, expand appearance, and then go to pathfinder and use the merge tool to make it one object. Then we can change it to a different color. We like the little quick tip or just want to show you, if you notice when I'm using the brush tool, when I draw the illustration, you can see that it's still selected after I've drawn it. You can turn this on and off. I find it quite handy to have it on just so that I can then quickly, when I don't like it, delete it, I need to adjust it. I can quickly adjust it, but there are instances where it can be quite annoying. To turn it on and off, if you double-click on the paint brush tool, you'll get your paint brush tool options. You can see here I've got keeps selected. If I turn that off and then use my brush, you can see it's now not selected. The other options in there that I want you to know, I put that back on. The fidelity. If I was to put it right up here on smooth, it will smooth out my lines quite substantially supposed to do so in wiggly, it's very smooth. Let's just get rid of a few of these, but if I were to change it, that fidelity to accurate it will do exactly what your masses and you can see that there are many, many anchor points on there and it's not as smooth. Let me just draw one next to it, that's smooth and I'll show you the difference. If I select quite of those to look at the difference in the number of anchor points. Depending on what look you're after, setting can be quite helpful. I generally keep mine somewhere in the middle. I have a very shaky hands so quite often I will move it up too smooth if I want something to be very accurate. I find it quite helpful that's why I'm always changing it so that's a couple of little tips for you. I'm now going to show you how to create a textured brush, I'll call this a crown brush. Let's just pop up into Photoshop. I've scanned in these crayon marks that I made with my kids crayons and I'm going to make a brush from one of these lines. I'm going to use the rectangle marquee tool. You can also use the lassie just to isolate that section and then copy it so it command C or control C. Then over an Illustrator, I'm just going to command V to paste it in. Then you need to vectorize it. To do that use image trace. Open up image trace, select the ignore white, select preview and you can see there is vectorized it. We can increase the threshold If you want to see a bit more. You can increase it or less but not too much. I think I'll have it pretty much around there and then expand it. At the moment it's actually not very straight, we need this to be straight for it to be a brush. I'm going to put a guidance, so if you've got your ruler visible, if you don't go to view rulers and then that will give you the option to show. So if I turn that off and then go back, views, show ruler. Then if you click on the ruler and hold it and drag, you can create a guide. I'm going to put a guide there, a horizontal guide and straightening up this line. Let's move it up here. I'm going to rotate it by selecting a and then just rotate it so it's across the line nicely. It's pretty cool except one little bit at the end where it's looking off a bit. The way we can fix that is to select it, I might just hard that guide. I can do that in my layers panel and go up to object, envelope distort and then make with mesh. We can change this normally for this little line, I would put it on two rows by two rows or you can increase that if you want. I'll just share what that is by putting the preview on and then click "Okay." We'll zoom in. Now, you can adjust, I just want to get this last little bit here and maybe this bit here aligned with the middle. Using my direct selection tool I can select points on this mesh and adjust my artwork, my line. I'm just dragging it down, it can get a bit fiddly. The other thing you need to do is go to your attributes panel. You can go up to windows, attributes and in here there's an option called use non-zero winding fill rule. We want to make sure that it's selected. The reason for that is when you draw with these brushes that you create, that will start with things happening where it overlaps each other. Its hard to explain, but just make sure that's selected. Now we can make our brush so we can drag that. We need to turn that off. Drag that into the brushes panel and select art brush. I'm going to call this crayon. Change the width to pressure if you've got a tablet I'm going to change the brush scale options to scalp. Fortunately, I also need to change the colorization to hue shift. Also, you can change the direction if you want it to be going up or down, Left to right, right to left. Generally I draw left to right so that's the direction I want, I want the thin end at the end so that one I'll leave it as is. We can always come back in here and fix it or change it. So I click "Okay" and let's give this a test. We have quite a nice texture line. See how the tail is thinner. If we change the direction and then apply, it will swap it around. We are going to change that back to [inaudible]. When this pops up, we need to make a change. You can leave your current ones as they were or you can apply it as a stroke, so it will update all the strokes that you have made. There you go. You've got a pretty cool crayon brush. I'm going to show you some calligraphic brushes that I like to have, and use a lot when I am coloring in my icons for my patterns. So calligraphic brushes are very useful for drawing flowers or they use pretty much anything really. The best way to do it, one of the standard brushes that I would always have in my brush panel, is a Calligraphic brush that's on an angle. To create a new and I'm going to click on New Brush and then select Calligraphic Brush. I'm just going to create an angled brush. I'm going to change the angle to 45. As you can see, you can use this little tool here, but I like to keep it accurate. So it's just going to be an angle to the right. We might call this one, angle right. I want to change the roundness a little bit. I don't want it to be round, I want it to be flat. So I'll change that to round 55. Then the size, set it at five. I will change it to pressure with a variation of five. I might actually put in the title, 5-point as well. Now look at that. So you can see it gives a nice variation to creating a petal on a flower. If I did that with just the basic brush, you can see it pretty much keeps the same size all the way around. It does have the same width, all the way around. With the angle, you can see that it changes the widths and makes it look a little bit more stylish. So if I was to create a quick flower. Then if I change that to the basic brush, it just gives it a better look, and more natural, smooth look I think. I generally have quite a few of these. IOS have, one to the right and one to the left. The quickest way to do that is to just drag that down into the duplicate icon, then double-click the copy and change it to angle left 5-point. You basically just need to change it to the other side, 135 degrees. The rest can stay the same. That's basically the same brush but it angles the other way. Depending on which side, you're going to get a different look and feel. I would generally have quite a few different sizes. May be seven point and a 10-point. The other brush I like to have is just a round brush. If I do a new brush, Calligraphic brush. Let's create a round, five-point brush. We can keep that as five points, and keep them all as fixed except for the size and I'd like to change it to pressure with a five-point variation. That means it will still allow you to use your tablet pin pressure to determine the actual size that it outputs. If I do it really lightly, that's what I get. But with a lot of pressure, that's what I get. I have a play and go ahead and create some brushes. You can follow the printout that I've provided in the resources section. Or you can create your own brushes. Just have fun and experiment because they can be a lot of fun to create. You can really come up with some really cool effects. Once you've created all your brushes, you need to save them. To do that, click on the icon Brush Libraries menu, the bottom left-hand corner of your brushes Panel and select save brushes. You can give it a name. I'm going to just call it, My Skill-share Brushes. Then click Save. Then if you were to open up a new document, you can then load those brushes into your panel by going back down to that menu, go to user-defined and there they are, My skill-share Brushes. Let's open up a little bit. I also like to change this to list view rather than the other way. Just makes it easier because I gave them all names. Then if you select the top one, hold down your shift key. Select the bottom one, go up to the right-hand menu and say add two brushes. You can then add them to your panel, and they're ready for you to use in your artwork. 7. 6 - Icons: Okay, it's time to bring our sketches to life. After you've opened up for scanned in my sketches here and I'm going to show you how I transform these in illustrator. I used to use the image trace tool with a lot of my sketches but I actually prefer just redrawing them myself. I've got a tablet which allows me to draw much better than what the image trace will do and I find the image trace. I still need to do a lot of fiddling around to get it how I like it. My tablet is my friend and I'm going to use that to show you how I transform this into beautiful, colorful objects. Let's start with the bird. I'm just going drag that over into a document here. I've just created a document, I have pulled in and my brushes. To do that, I went to open my brush pallet, go to user-defined and then click on your save brushes. I also want to pull in my color palette that I saved when I did my mood board. I'm going to go user-defined and I know it's down the bottom here and click on the folder there and it will put the colors in there for me. I'm going to keep that on a layer called sketches and then I'm going to create a new layer and place that at the bottom. The sketches layer, I'm going to change the transparency to multiply and just take it down a bit so it's a bit fainter. Then I'm going to unlock that layer. Again, zoom in a bit. Let's get started, I'm going to start with the base color that I want for this. I'm going to select beam for brush, and I'm going to choose; let me see what I want, an angle. It doesn't really matter how I could also use a round brush for this because all we're doing is the outline. I'm actually going to use the blob tool as well. That's shift bay and the reason for that, I'll show you in a minute. I'm just going to draw the outline. I'm just doing the body, I'm not going to do that top bit, the wings or the tail, I'm just doing this bit here. If I put it on the direct selection tool on the keyboard and then select the middle and delete it. That will fill it in for me, that's what makes the blob tool really handy to use. Next, I'm going to do the wings. I'm actually going to bring down the tint of that. If I select that and go in my color guide and just play around or split it. Let me get a lighter, particularly the sketch. Just leave it a bit there for the moment and now I'm going to go back to my blob tool this time and I choose my five left angle. Just draw the outline, I just realized I didn't change my color, and the reason why this needs to be change, otherwise it will emerge in with my first color so if I want to do like that with original color and then put all the blob. It will actually end up being that first one is you can say, we need it to be a different color. Let's try that again, don't have to be two and it's my sketches were really just an idea and guide and quiet often will do a completely different to my sketch as it's just a guide and see how I want to change that a little bit. I'm just going to take off a bit of that top bit, it went a little bit too far. I'm using the eraser tool there to just bring that back a bit. The eraser tool is shift D on the keyboard. Just using my direct selection tool to adjust that. Another little helpful tip is when you have your blob or your brush selected. If you hold down the option key, it will change to this smooth tool. If you need to smooth out a few things, and that's really handy, you can switch between the paintbrush and the smith tool quite quickly, and I use that quite a bit. Just notice that there's a little bit there that I want to feel in. Now I want to make this head part and this part here different color, now I'm going to select that body and I'm going to paint inside. You get down to drawing modes and then select draw inside. Let's go with a pink which use the blob again. It has seven point round here. I just wanted to fill in this area here and see how it stays inside the body. We are going to do the same down here, we'll just double-click outside of that to get back. You might change the color of that to slightly lighter pink but I might think this one needs to be a bit lighter as well. As you can see, I liked what can change Grey, it's a little different. Let's draw the eye, for the eye am going to use the eclipse tools. Now, we're going to hold down the shift and that way I can get a perfect eye. I want a perfect eye that for instance, I do. Then fill that with white and then once again, I'm going to draw inside. Just take that sketch up put in my way. I'm going to draw inside the inner part, the black. I want actually change the color of the eye, just to be a bit different. Let's put its legs on the blob again and I'm going to use a five point right angle. Let's use brush instead of blob, try that again. All right let's take it's beak Now we just need to add some decoration to feathers. I'm going to use my five point right angle, let's change that to white, and am just going to do something big for me. When I do these I will have to group them all together and expand them, so, if I go to select, saying appearance that will select the more, then I'm going to the object expand appearance, and then I'm going to do command G to group them, so now when I select them they all get selected. I'm going to do some more of those down here. Object, expand appearance, and groups. It is coming to light now, it's amazing how just adding a few little marks can really transform look and feel of this. I'm going do the same for the wings and the tail. Going to go to the other left angle because I'm going to do it from the back to the front. I might make these ones bigger, maybe a little bit fatter. Now, I'm going to fill that, not too big, just bring them down a touch. It's better, then I can promise we can a bit more. Let's select those, and expand them, and group them. Now I think that is a little bit too much white, so I might change some of these to a darker color, so I want us go into that group, let's just select some random ones and let's change them to a darker color. That looks better. It is an image that really has been transformed from the original sketch. I'm going to do next, first I'm going to just group that altogether as well, so I just select it all, then command J to group it. I will just move it either and bring in the next one. I will do this one. I just drag that over, and clip in here, and zoom in. Let's give this another try, as you can see, I mostly use the Blob, and the Paint Tool. That's pretty much all I use, and I have so many brushes here that they all line it. Occasionally, I will use Pencil tool and the Pen tool, but generally it's mostly the Blob. The Blob is my favorite and the Brush tool. The Brush tool, and I generally use that more for the finer details, the Blob for field in parts of it. I might speed this up, so that it's not so boring and just follow along. Right there are all my icons that I sketched up. Now, I have some color, and I'm going to add a couple more, what I call fillers. You may notice that my patterns are always quiet, busy, lots of data, although they are simplistic in a way, but there was a lot of stuff going on in them. I like to create a few other little things that I use to fill gaps in between. First I'm just going to draw some little flowers, and I'm just drawing this straight on using my tablet. I am going to use a five-point round or left. Let's try that one again. Just to create some little Philip flowers of Homer. I'm just going to create, feature those, and I'm going to hold down the option key, and just drag, and just create some duplicates, different sizes, rotate them a bit. I'm going to do some little teardrop leaf pattern, and I need one more branches of berries look, so I'm going to use five point round to do this one, to draw a branch, and I'm going to put lots of berries on this. That's not very easy, we group that, we are done. Next video show, you have to put it all together and create a pattern. 8. 7 - Simple Pattern: To create a simple pattern using the icons that you have created. I'm going to open up a new document, you got file new and I'm just going to do 1000 by 1000 pixels square. You can choose RGP or CMYK depending on what you're creating it for. If it's for online, you would choose RGB, if it was for printing, you would use CMYK just depends on the project that you're working on. I would also change the resolution to 300 DPI, and click "Ok". Lets go out. First thing I do is remove this swatch. If he select all by clicking the first one after the black guy who was I to keep the white and black there. Then slip holding down the Shift key, select the last one, and then just click on the delete icon. I'm going to bring in my color palette that I created previously, then click on the folder to put it over my swatch panel. The second thing I like to do is bring in my brushes and the brushes panel if it's not open, just go to window brushes. I'm going to get rid of the ones that are currently there. If I select them all and then hit delete. If you get this message that means you just need to go into normally the graphics panel and just delete what you've got there because the brushes that you've currently got there might be used by something in this graphics pedal. If I get rid of those then go back to brushes and try to let it again, you'll always have one or two that stick around. I just like to clean it up that will do. I will bring in my brushes that I saved, I select them all I probably don't need any of them but I'll put them in any way because we've already created our icons but it's nice to have them just in case. If I write click on the top right-hand corner there and say add to brushes, then add to my panel. I've got my icons over here and it's going to grab them all and then drag them across to the mostly going to re-size them. If I hit select them all and hit a key on the keyboard, I can resize there. The benefit of doing this in Illustrator is you can resize them to whatever you like and it won't affect them at all. I'm going to make them over to the side as well. I'm going to resize that a little bit, we don't want them that big. Let's get started, the first thing I do generally is placed the icons along the top the left-hand side of the art board. If I just go ahead and grab some icons and arrange them. I have pretty much failed in the top and the left-hand side. I like everything on the top has to be located on the bottom and everything on the left side has to be repeated onto the right. The way I do that is I just grab the whole of the top section and then go to object transform move, and then use the preview button. You're going to go vertically so we are going to change horizontal to zero. Then we know that water from there 1000 by 1000 pixels, if I move it 1000 down, you can say that perfectly aligns down the bottom there. We also want to click "Copy" to copy it. You've got it all repeated on the bottom and then just to extend to the left. Again, just select everything on the left, go object transform move, and this time I'm going to go across the horizontal 1000 vertical zero and select copy. We just need to fill in the middle. There are a couple of gaps I can see when you get down here, I want to fix as well. You just have to make sure if you do put another icon on the left or top, that you repeat it again down the bottom or on the right. I will start filling in the center of it and just grab and all I'm doing there is holding down the option key, clicking and dragging, and that creates a duplicate. I also like to flip them, for this I'm going to reflect it, transform reflect. I'm going to vertically reflect it the other way so it's the opposite just to change things up a bit. I'm going to put that one. Going to do same thing with that. I'm going to go ahead and do this, I'll speed it up for you. Pretty much filled up the whole foliage. Now I want to add a background and also another layer too which just to give it a bit more depth. First let's add a background. I'm going to use the rectangle tool. Just click anywhere and then 1000 by one 1000 output. I'm just going to type in 1000 by one 1000 and I'm going to align it, so select the align tool. Make sure align tool artboard is selected and then just align horizontal to the left and that will align top. That should align perfectly there. We want to send that to the back so if I right-click it, arrange, send to back. I want to make it a dark color. I'm going to make it that it's an almost black, it's not quite black and then I'm going to lock that layer for the moment. If I go into my layers panel, it's right down the bottom layer. I'm just going to lock it so that it doesn't move if I'm moving other things around. I want to add just a little bit of depth to this. I'm going to get my blog tool and I'm going to choose this blue. I'm going to use my brush, the 20 point pressure, one will do. It's going to create some random areas here, globes and I will send these to the back. If I select it and you can hold down shift command and left square bracket will send it to the back. Then I need to go one layer above to get it above that background. I'm also going to change that to black. I don't know, I'll just keep it on the blue and change the transparency. I just want it to be very subtle, that's probably too subtle. Let's try pink. Let's just try taking the opacity down. It's probably more of those after. Let's just click and drag another one to another spot. Stop here. Now remember if you do go over the edge, you need to repeat it at the bottom and see how this is just giving slightly more light, more depth effect. I need to repeat that one, so let's move that one over, 1000, it's probably too close to this one now. I'll just put that one up there, trying to paste it. I think we need one more. Let's make this one a bit smaller. Oops. Now we have it, gives it a little bit more depth, doesn't it? Well, I think that's pretty finished. We can test this to make sure that it repeats properly. Let's unlock that back, rectangle and came out, let's just get rid of that one. We need to create another blank square at the background. Let's do another square that's one 1000 by 1000. It has no feel and no stroke and then align it once again to the artboard left and top. Then send it to the back. Okay, now we need to select everything and drag it into west options panel. Now if we move over and create a rectangle, with large space and then fill it with our pattern. Oops, as you can see, I filled that the stroke instead of the fill so let's switch that over and there you have it. Now this is a good way to test that and make sure that everything has repeated nicely. It also gives you a chance to have a look and see if you need to move anything at the moment and I'm happy with that, but if I wanted to, I could go back and rearrange a few things and then create that again. If you want to save your swatch, your repeat pattern. I would normally just go File, Export, Export As and let's just put it in here. Let's save it as a PNG or you can save it as JPEG and then make sure you select use upwards. That way it will cut out all the bits around the edge and just give me that repeating squared. I'm not going to do that right now, but that's how you extract it from in this trial and you can use that to upload, to print on demand sites like spoonflower or the one site like redbubble, whatever you like. I don't often use an actual repeat pattern when I'm sending it to clients and don't put that repeat on a website or Instagram, social media. Because if you want to put something on social media, you should just take a small portion of it or a large part of it because you don't want people stealing your pattern and then put it on their own stuff, which does happen unfortunately. There you go. You have a passion. 9. Thank you!: Thank you so much for taking my class. I've had so much fun cheering you the way I create simple but fun patterns from simple sketches. I hope you've managed to take away a few tips and you can use them in your own work. I look forward to seeing your patterns, so please share them in the project's area, along with your new boards and sketches. If posting on social media, don't forget to tag me and use the hashtag Mel Armstrong Skillshare, so I can see your beautiful work. If you have any questions, please post them in the community section and I'll reply to you as soon as I can. Once again, thank you so much and I look forward to bringing you another class soon. See you.