Surface Pattern Design: Make A Manual Pattern Repeat And Digitize It In Adobe Illustrator

1. Intro: Hello there. My name is Anna and I'm a Surface Pattern Designer from Umea, Sweden. In this class, I will show you how to make a seamless hand-drawn pattern repeat the manual way. I will go through my thoughts about the choice of motives, composition, and direction in the pattern, and then show you how you can take your hand-drawn design and digitize it in Adobe Illustrator. If you are a beginner at Illustrator, I've also added a part to this class with some basic steps, where I show you how to handle the functions and tools I use later on, so you can keep up and be able to do the same as I do throughout the class. After this class, you will be able to make a seamless hand-drawn pattern repeat, and also know how to vectorize it and turn it into a digital pattern in Adobe Illustrator. This is a super fun way to make patterns, so let's dive into it. 2. 1. Make a Manual Repeat: It's time to start drawing my pattern. I always start by deciding which motifs I want to include and draw them a bit roughly. This time I've drawn them pretty nicely so that you can see what I'm going to do. I always try to choose motifs that have slightly mixed shapes and different sizes. I will draw one large flower with some angular shapes, a medium-size flower that has both soft round shapes and a little more sharp pointy ones, and then two small flowers that also have slightly different shapes and expressions. I do this to give the pattern a little bit more life and variety. I'm drawing on plain white printing paper and with a pencil, eraser is also good to have. The very first thing I'm going to do is to draw a diamond shape on my paper, and inside of that, I will draw the first part of my pattern. I start by roughly measuring out the middle of each side of my paper. You can use any size of paper you want here. I use an A4 size. Then I draw some loose lines connecting the points and I get a diamond-shaped surface. Something like that. Now, I will fill in this area with my motifs. When I'm done, it's going to look like something like this. I will draw all the way out to the tips of the diamond and leave the corners blank. I worked like this to make it easier to see and work with the next part of the pattern. Because when I'm done, I will divide this paper into parts, and then it will look like this. I will have four parts, which I'll switch up like this, and then fill in the rest of my pattern in the middle here. This will give me a seamless pattern repeat. You can see here why it's important to draw all the way to the tips of the first diamond. If I had left it blank here, it would have been much more difficult to fill with flowers because the paper is cut off. In this space, I'll fill in the rest of my pattern later on. But first, I will draw the flowers in my first diamond. I always start with my biggest motif, in this case, this flower. I'll sketch out circles where I want it to be. I'll try to distribute them evenly. Then I continue with the middle-sized flower, placing it evenly too, something like that. When I'm happy with the placement, I draw the rest. Now, I will continue with the middle flower. As you can see, the stem is bent a bit. What I want to do when I draw, is to bend the stem in different directions, and also draw the flowers with the leaves both up and down. Should I draw all the stems in the same direction, the pattern would look a bit tilted or directed that way. But I don't want that. I want the pattern to have motifs in all directions and to have a nice balance. Then I follow up with the berries and leaves. Here I can try to merge my pattern together a bit. For example, letting the leaves go a little bit into the gap here. When I'm working at the very tip of the diamond, I'm trying to get my motifs to reach all the way out. As I said, it will make it easier when I draw the rest of the pattern later on. It doesn't matter that much if your motifs fall over the lines a bit here, as you can see, mine has, but that's fine. Like that. I'm done with my bigger motifs. Now, I will fill in the rest of the diamond with the small flowers. Now, I feel quite happy with my first part of the pattern. But before I cut this sketch part and continue to fill in the corners, I will trace my pattern with a fine liner. I do this now to make it easier to work with it on my computer later on. To trace, I use a light box, and the same white paper that I drew on before, and a black fine liner, size 03. Then I just go over all the motifs with my fine liner. If you do not have a light box, you can use a window in daylight, for example, just to tape up your drawing with a piece of paper over it and trace it. Of course, it's also possible to do this with an iPad if you have one. However, I think it's so meditative to draw like this by hand. I'm practicing using my iPad, but I'm not really ready to replace my pens and the light box yet. I might get there, we'll see. Now, I'm done with my first part of the pattern. I usually have a little look here to see if there are any weird blank spaces, there for example and fill them with motifs if needed. There too. Like that. The next step is to take my sketch, divide it into four and fill in my blanks. I fold my paper twice, like that. Before I cut it into pieces, I want to mark my parts. I use a pencil and write numbers a little loosely in the corners,1, 2, 3, 4. Then I cut the parts apart. Now I want to switch places of these diagonally. Number 1, changes places with number 4 and number 2 with number 3. There we go, 4, 3, 2, 1. Now it's time to fill in the blanks here in the middle. I use a bit of poster putty to fix the parts on my desk. You can also use tape and tape the pieces together. That's probably even better. Tape on the back though, otherwise it will be difficult to draw. Then I look at where I have my motifs and sketch out where I want the rest of them so that I get an even distribution here as well. I start with a large flower as before. Then I take the middle flowers and do the same with them and then I draw. When I make the middle flowers, I do as before and look at the direction of the stems and try to bend these in different directions as well. There we go. Now, I will fill in the rest with the smaller flowers. Okay. Now I feel pretty happy with my pattern. I will trace what I drew this time as well in the same way I did before. To be able to keep what I already have drawn apart from my new motifs. I'd like to make this line here a little darker so I can see what falls inside and what falls outside of it. To be really sure, I can also double-check with my first diamond to see if our motif is traced already. I'll move my sketch to the light box and then I'll trace it. So that's it. This is actually a finished pattern repeat that you can make a seamless pattern of, if you repeat it side-by-side. I have made some copies of my sketch to demonstrate for you. If you put them side-by-side like this, you will see that I get a seamless pattern. If you do not want to make your pattern digital, your repeat is finished now, but I will use my two diamond shapes, scan them. You can also take a photo of them if you don't have a scanner and then continue to work on my pattern in Illustrator. 3. 2. Basic Illustrator: In this section, I will show some basic features if you're new to Illustrator. I will only show you how to do the steps I do later in this class and will not go into all that much detail. Just show you how to basically handle objects and how to navigate in your document. If you want a comprehensive basic course in Illustrator, I recommend that you look for another one. There are lots of good one here at Skillshare. With that said, let's begin. This is what Illustrator looks like when I open it. It may look a little different depending on which version you have, but it should look something like this. I start by creating a new document, by clicking ''Create New.'' There are a lot of different presets here. It doesn't really matter what size of the art board I chose here. I'll just go for the A4 one. Here I can name my document and here you can choose the unit you want to work with. I like to work with something I can easily count with. So I take millimeters, but you can choose what you prefer under Color Mode, I select RGB. You can also select CYMK. The common guideline is that it's usually better to work with RGB when your art is meant to be displayed digitally and CYMK if it's something that's going to be printed. But that really depends on a lot of different things and you can always change the settings later on. I'll go for the RGB. Here you can choose the resolution. I take the highest 300 PPI. Press ''Create.'' Like that. This is my art board, which is the size of an A4 size paper because you can think of it as a piece of paper on your desk. You can use the art board, but you can also work outside of it. There are a lot of great tools in Illustrator. Here's a selection of them. Most of them have a shortcut and I'm a big fan of using those. It can be a little difficult to keep all of them in your head if you're a beginner. So I have made a little cheat sheet with the shortcuts and we'll use in this class. I will start by importing it and placing it on my workspace. You can download this sheet yourself, be our resources on the class page if you want. I go to File, Place, and locate my sheet. There it is. Press ''Place'', then I Click ''Anywhere'' on my desktop to place it. I want to embed my note to see it better. I do that by going to Window and properties. Here, under Quick Actions. I click on ''Embed.'' Then I have a copy of my note here on the desk. The default tool, when you open a document in Illustrator is this black arrow that you see is called the Selection tool. You can access it by pressing V on your keyboard. There are also other tools for selecting and moving objects in Illustrator. I will show you some of those later on. Now I want to import some motives that I have drawn and digitize them. I do that in the same way as with my shortcuts. I go to File, Place. I locate my scanned or photographed drawing. Here it is. Click ''Anywhere'' to place the image. I have drawn three simple flowers with the fine liner on a plain white paper. As you can see, I have two flowers here where all the lines are closed and one with the outline of a leaf is not completely closed. When you draw, it's important to close all the lines that you want to vectorize. I will show you why. Now, when I vectorize these flowers, I go to Window Properties. Here, under Quick Actions, there's a button called Image Trace. What it does is to help you turn what you have drawn into scalable objects in Illustrator. I choose the black and white logo preset to get a clean black and white result. There I press ''Expand'' and ''Ungroup.'' Now, I have my motives here. As you can see, I also got a white background. I will not use that, so I just click on it and press ''Delete'' to remove it. Deleting that too. As you can see now, I have two old flowers with a black border and a white background. But the flower where I did not draw the line all the way, got an empty leaf. You can fix this digitally in Illustrator. But if you're a beginner, I would say it's easier to go back to your drawing, and fix the lines there, scan or take a picture of it again, and then try to vectorize it once again. After I have vectorized my flowers like this, all parts are loose. I want to be able to handle each flower as a whole. So what I do now is to group all the parts that belong to that flower. I do this by selecting all the parts with the selection tool and then press ''Control'' or ''Command G'' to group them. Then I can move around my flower as a whole. Sometimes it can be difficult to access certain parts with the selection tool because it's a rectangular shape. If I, for example, drag out a selection like this, it selects that flower as well, but I just want this one. So then I can use the Lasso Tool instead. I get that by pressing Q on my keyboard. Then a small lasso comes up at the cursor. Then I just click and draw the selection around what I want to select. Press ''Control G'' to group it as well. I will not use this flower, so I select it and Press ''Delete.'' Now I have two group flowers here. If I want to access only a part of one of them, for example, to color it, I can't do that by using the selection tool anymore. If I use that one, I select the whole flower. I can instead use the direct selection tool. I can access it by pressing A. Then I get a white arrow instead of a black one. With this, I can access the parts of the object even though they are grouped. Now I can, for example, corner the middle of this flower without ungrouping the whole motive. When using the selection tools, only one object or part of an object is selected at a time. If I want to select several objects at the same time, I can do this by first selecting an object and while holding down the Shift key, I'll click on the other objects I want to select to. This applies to both of the selection and the direct selection tool. Another great shortcut is Control or Command C, which is the undo command. It allows me to regret what I did several steps back if I want to. I can also rotate my objects. To do this, I select the object I want to rotate and then press R on my keyboard. As you can see, a small blue mark appears here. This is the point the object is rotated around. I can move it by just clicking where I want to place it. Put it in the middle here, and then I click and drag outside my flower to rotate it. If I move the mark, for example, out there, the flower is rotated around that point. If I press Shift while I rotate my object, it is rotated perpendicularly 45 degrees at a time. It can be useful if, for example, I want to rotate something exactly one full or half turn. If I do not hold down the Shift key, I control the degree of the rotation myself. I can also scale my objects up or down, make them bigger or smaller. I select the object I want to resize and press F on my keyboard. Here I also get a blue marker, like when I rotated the object and this mark determines the point I want to scale up or down from. I put it in the middle there too. When scaling, it's easiest to work diagonally. If I pulled from the side like this, it's difficult to control my shape. It easily flips out when I do that. But if I pull it from the diagonal, instead, it's easier to keep the same shape. It's possible to pull from any direction as long as you work on that diagonal. If I hold down the Shift key, when I change the size, my object is scaled proportionally. If I release the Shift key, the shape changes a bit depending on how I move the cursor. That was a quick tour of how to handle objects on a basic level. It's also good to be able to navigate smoothly in the document. One helpful thing to be able to do is to zoom in and out. To do that, you can either hold down the Alt key and scroll up and down in your document. Illustrator zooms in and out, centered around where you have your cursor. If I place the arrow in the middle of the flower here, it's zooms towards it. You can also press ''Control or Command'' and plus to zoom in and minus to zoom out. Another very useful thing is the hand tool that allows you to move around in your workspace. You'll find it here in the panel or by pressing H on your keyboard. Then you can click and drag around. You can activate this tool temporarily by holding down the space bar and at the same time, drag yourself around in the document. If you release the Spacebar key, you return to the cursor you had before. This can really be handy if you just want to move a little in some direction when working with something. For example, when you're selecting several objects in a pattern. The last shortcut I want to cover is Control or Command F, which saves your document. Make sure to do this regularly so that you do not risk losing your work if an error occurs. That was it for this basic part of the class. As I said before, it's very short compared to what you can do in Illustrator. But I wanted to focus on showing you what I actually do in this class. Should you encounter any problems, just write to me on the class page or DM me on Instagram, and I will do my very best to help you. But now let's dive into the rest of this class. 4. 3. Pattern Making in Illustrator: Now it's time to get my pattern into Illustrator and continue to work on it there. I'm creating a new document. I go for A4 format. It doesn't really matter what size I choose here. I won't use the artboard anyway, but I'll go for A4. I name my document pattern and choose millimeters as the unit. I will have to specify dimensions on the paper I drew the pattern on a little later on. It will be easier to work with millimeters instead of, say, pixels here. I go for RGB Color mode and 300 PPI, and then I create my document. The first thing I almost always do is to hide my artboard because I will not use it. I go to View and Hide Artboards, then I want to import my scan drawings with my pattern. I do this by going to File and Place. I locate my scanned diamonds. I'll start with the first one and click anywhere to place it on my workspace. I want to flip it over so it's laying the same way as I drew it. I press R for rotate, and while holding down the Shift key, I rotate the diamond in the right direction. By holding down the Shift key while I rotate, I can rotate my object exactly 45 degrees at a time, which is quite smooth if you want to turn something exactly in some direction. Now I want to use the panel called the Properties panel. If you don't have it open, you'll find it under Window and Properties. I select my drawing, go to Properties and here under Quick Actions, there's a button called Image Trace. I'm moving this so you can see. Under Image Trace, I choose Black and White Logo and then Illustrator has vectorized my flowers. I press Expand and Ungroup. I won't use this white background that I got, so I just delete that. I also have some rubbish there. I'll remove that too. Now I have one of two diamonds here. I'll move it away a bit and then I do the same thing with the other diamond. Locate it, place, rotate. Image Trace, Black and White Logo, Expand, Ungroup. Remove the background. Now I have my pattern parts here. If I zoom in, you will see that all my parts of the flowers are loose like this and I want to be able to move the motif as a whole. Therefore, I have to group all the flowers individually. I do this by selecting all the parts of the flower and pressing Control G. Sometimes it can be a little difficult to access a flower like this one, for example, and then I can use the Lasso tool instead to select it. I get it by pressing Q, then I group all the parts that belongs to every flower. For example, I group the middle-sized flower together with all the little dots, even though they are not attached. Now I have grouped all of the flowers and we'll merge together my two diamond shapes into one. I see that I have placed this part upside down actually. I'll select it, press R to rotate, and while I hold down the Shift key, I spin it in the right position. Then I place it next to my second diamond shape. It doesn't matter against which side I joined my forms. You can place it at any side you want. Now I have a new long shape here with my motifs. I make sure to save my document here as well so that I don't lose anything. The next step is to give my flowers some color. I often color the motifs in a few arbitrary colors first so I can easily keep them apart when I'm building the pattern and then change the colors when the pattern is ready. I start by selecting. That one I've forgotten to group. I see. I select all motifs that I want to be in the same color. Then under Properties, there is something called Recolor under Quick Actions. Click there and this window will appear. Here, I don't want to color the black contours so then I click that little arrow to lock it. I just want to color the white. I unlock that one by clicking the arrow and then click here to enable it. Illustrator asks if I want to add it, click "Yes". After that, I just click on this default color group. The white is colored in a random color. Red is fine. Press "Okay". Then I take these little flowers, do the same. Recolor. Now the colors are already set to the same as last time, only white should be colored. I click on the same palette. I do not want these flowers to be the same color as the big one, so I click on this button that randomly selects another one from the palette. Yellow will be great. Here it asks if I want to save the changes, but I just choose "No" here. Then I do the same thing with all of my motifs. Some parts of my flowers, I want to be a different color. For example, the center of the large flower here, I want that to be something other than red. The middle of the small flower too, and also the leaves on this one. To access these parts, I use the direct selection tool. You can also press A. Then I select all the parts I want to change to a different color, I start with the purple flowers. I think that's all of them. There are several ways to change colors, one of them is to use the color guide panel here. If you don't see it, you'll find it under Window, then Color Guide. If I click on the color that the object is right now, this little box here, it gives me different shades and tints of the same color below. Then I can choose a slightly lighter one maybe, something like that. I will change these colors later on. It's not super important how they look now, I just want it to be a different color. I do the same with the inside of the large flowers. I think they can be lighter red, maybe. I also want to change the colors of the middle. I'll make them just white. Finally, I also want to change these orange leaves. They should be a different color than the berries. I go for a green color there, like that. Now, all of my motifs have different colors, and the next step is to build my pattern. I will do this by using Illustrator's pattern tool. I'll select all of the motifs, go to Object, Pattern, and Make. Here in the pattern tool, I will work with the same measurements as the paper I drew on. That's why it's a good idea to put millimeters as a unit on my document when I create it. I know that my A4 paper is 297 millimeters wide and 210 millimeters high, so I enter that here. I check this box here to dim the copies of my motifs so I can see the originals more clearly. As you can see here not all my flowers are visible in the pattern, there are some holes here and there. This is because the motifs ended up outside of my pattern tile frame. All objects that have ended up outside, I have to move to the inside for them to be visible. For example, these flowers, I have to select them and drag them down there. Same thing on this side, pull them there, here too. You can see those that extended over the edge are visible, but those that have fallen completely outside are not visible, so they must be moved. There is one too. As you can see now, it feels like it got a little crowded between the motifs here. Then I want to increase the height of my repeat a bit. I do this under pattern options. It should appear when you open the pattern tool, but if not, it's there under Window and pattern options. Here I increase the height of my pattern. As you can see it slides apart when I increase and it goes together when I decrease. I think I want it like that. I'll increase the width a bit as well. Yes, that looks good. Now I can zoom in a bit and see what it looks like between the motifs. If something looks strange, I can move the motifs a little bit here if needed. That one ended up a bit tight against that leaf. I want to rotate it a bit and select it, press R and rotate it. Something like that. Maybe it's a little tight here too, rotate that one too. This object is grouped together, so to access only that dot, I use the direct selection tool and select all of it so I can move it on its own. Here you can keep on tweaking and adjusting forever if you want. Yeah, I think it looks good now. When you feel happy with your motifs, you can have a look by unchecking dim copies here. If it looks good, just press Done. Then Illustrator has created your pattern here under the swatches panel. If you do not have it open, you will find it under Window, Swatches. I can click and drag out my repeat to have a look at it. The next thing I want to do is change the colors of my pattern. These colors don't look that nice if you're asking me. I will show you how to do that in the next part. 5. 4. Change Colors: [MUSIC] Now it's time to change the colors of the pattern. Here I have my pattern repeat, but I will actually work directly from the pattern tool to do this. To get into that again, I go here to the swatches panel and just double-click on my pattern tile. Here, I can dim the copies again so I can see my motives a little better. First of all, I want to import my color palette. I do this in the swatches panel. I click on this button at the bottom here, and select "Other Library" and locate the file with my color palette. You can download the same palette as me if you want to. You'll find it under "Resources" on the Class page. Click "Open", and then it will appear. To import the palette to my workspace. I just click on the small folder here once, and it will end up here, and I can start working with it. To change a color in my pattern, I will use the direct selection tool. Click on our surface that has the color I want to change. The red, for example. Go to "Select", "Same" "Fill Color". Then it selects all the surfaces that has the same color. I'll hide the selection marks so you can see what I do, and then I just click on the color I want instead, maybe orange. Then I do the same with the rest of the colors. I select "Same", "Fill Color". They can maybe be the beige color, I think [MUSIC] , something like that. I think I want to change the outline of this flower. And since all the parts of the flowers are grouped together, it's easiest to select all the flowers, then go to "Properties" and "Recolor". Here, I do not want to change the blue colors, I click the arrow on them to lock them, and then click on the black one to unlock that one, and click here to add it. Then I choose my color palette and give it another color. Now the contours are of the same colors as the leaves, but I would like them to be a little bit darker. I click on that color, and then I change the amount of black down here. Maybe something like that. I press "Okay'', then "No" to save. The remaining black, the outline of the big flowers and all of the small ones, I think I want to remove. I zoom in a bit so you can see, and to do that, I use the Direct Selection Tool. Click on the black. Again, go to "Select", "Same", "Fill Color", and everything black in my pattern is selected. Then I just hit "Delete" to remove it, like that. Had I not changed the colors of the outline of this flower first, I would also have removed the outline around that one, but I didn't want to do that. I wanted to keep the branch, I changed that color first. Now I'm happy with my colors, I click "Done". Then Illustrator updated my pattern here. If I drag out the repeat again, you will see that it looks a little bit different than before. It made quite a difference. I also want a background color for my pattern. As you can see now, the background is transparent. To add a background color, I select "My Repeat". As you can see, the background box is here, I double-click on it so that it's selected, and then select a color I want to use. Maybe that one, blue. Here I can also work with the color guide and choose a different tone or shade, that looks good. Once I have found the color that I'm happy with, I have to make a transparent copy of that background and place it at the very back of "My Repeat". Otherwise, Illustrator won't understand that it's a seamless pattern. To do this, I make sure my background is selected, then I press "Control" or "Command C" to copy it, and then "Control V" to paste a copy at the back. With a copy still selected, I make sure that both the stroke and the fill color is set to none here in the swatches panel. Double-click to get back, and then I take "My Repeat" and drag it into the swatches panel to create a pattern with a background color. I can have a look at it by making a rectangle and click on my pattern tile to fill it. I can also right-click on the rectangle and select "Transform", "Scale" to scale it in or out a bit to see how it looks. Uncheck "Transform Objects" so that only the pattern is scaled and then change the scale in the uniform box, but it looks pretty good, I think. I might want to change the center of the large flowers to a darker color, I think. I'll do that directly on "My Repeat" that I have here. I select it, click in the middle, with the direct selection tool. Go to "Select", "Same", "Fill Color", then all centerpieces are selected. I want a darker color, that will be good, I think. Double-click to get back. I take "My Repeat" again and drag it into swatches, and I'll have a new pattern. I click on my rectangle to see what it looks like. It looks good I think. That's that. I'm done with the colors of my pattern, and in the next part, I will add some more details to it so that it gets a little bit more depth. 6. 5. Add Detail: Now, I will make the last details of my pattern. I will make the changes directly to my pattern repeat. If you don't have it open, you can get it by clicking on the pattern tile in the swatches panel, and drag the repeat onto your workspace. There you have it. I want to start by adding a detail on the inside of my little flowers. My entire repeat is now grouped. To access my flowers directly, I use the direct selection tool. I click on the middle of my flower, copy it by pressing control C, and then paste a new part at the front by pressing control F. Then I will give the new part a different color. I'll go for white. I want to make it a little smaller too, so I press S to scale, and then I just drag the size down a bit. Maybe something like that. Then I go and do the same with all the little flowers. Select with direct selection, copy control C, paste in front with control F. Color with white. Press S, and drag down the size. All the new parts that fall over the edge of my repeat, that one for example, and that one, I will copy from this side to the opposite side. I start by shaking the height of my repeat. Select the background with the direct selection tool, and go to properties. Here, I see it's 212 millimeters. I copy that measurement, then I select the white parts that fall outside here. This one and that one. Right-click, go to transform, and move. Here, I want to move the parts vertically, not horizontally, so I set horizontally to zero, and in the vertical box, I paste my background measure. Then I press copy, and they show up down here too. I do the same thing with the flowers that fall over on this side. I select my background with direct selection tool, go to properties, copy the width this time then I select the white part that falls outside. Right-click, transform, move. Now I set vertically to zero and paste the width into the horizontal box. Click copy, then I have it there too. Then I continue with the rest of them. I want to do basically the same with my Bach flowers. The easiest way to access them this time is to ungroup a bit. I click on my repeat with the selection tool and choose ungroup. Click on the objects and see if the Bach flowers are free. If not, right-click again and select ungroup. Now they are ungrouped but still grouped in their flower forms. If you find a place with grouped flowers, you can just right-click and select ungroup again until they are free. Now I will do the same thing as I did with the previous flowers. But this time I will copy the whole flower, instead of just a part. I select the Bach flower with the selection tool. Copy it by hitting control C. Paste a copy in front of it with control F. Give it another color, and then scale down by pressing S. I want it to be scaled down around the middle of the flower. As you can see, a blue little marker appears here. I click in the middle to place it there, and then the flower will be scaled down around this point. Then I reduce the leaves until it looks good. Had I not put the scale mark in the middle, for example, there instead, the flower would have been reduced around that point. But I want it to be tied to the middle, so therefore, I click there after I press S. Then I just continue the same way with all of my Bach flowers. Now I want to move the parts that ended up over the edge in the same way as before. I select the background, go to properties, copy the height, select my flower parts. Right-click, transform, move, set horizontal to zero, paste the height vertically, and click copy. I think I also want to give these berries a few dots. Some of them at least. I'll do this with the blob brush tool. You'll find it here. You can also press shift B to get it. I want to work with a white color, I think. Then I just click on the berries I want to give a dot. As you can see, the brush stroke is a bit big for some of my berries. I can resize the brush by using the bracket keys on my keyboard. The left one to decrease the size and the right one to increase it. For these two flowers, I have already put the dots on this side. I want to copy them from there to there. I do as before, mark the background with the direct selection tool or the properties of the width. Then I mark all the white dots that belongs to the two flowers. Right-click, go to transform, move, and paste the width in the horizontal box. I set the vertical to zero and copy. Then my berries got a little bit more character, I think. The very last thing I want to do is to try to make my large flowers a little more angular and see what that looks like. It's a predefined effect, and I think it can go nicely in a pattern with a lot of soft shapes like this one. I just want to change the leaves on my flowers. Since they are the same color, I select them using that color. I select the leaf with direct selection tool. Go to select same fill color. Then let me hide the selection so you can see what I do. I press control and H to do that. Then I go to object, path, simplify. Then I get this little box to pop up. I click on these three lines to bring up all the options. Here you can play a little with simplifying your motives. What it does is to reduce the number of anchor points so that the shapes become more streamlined. But I want to try to make all my lines straight. I first set the simplify curve to 100 percent. Then I lower the angle threshold and click convert to straight lines. As you can see, all the leaves of my large flowers became angular. You can pull the slider here to make them even straighter. If I were to pull 100 percent, they would just become simple lines, but I do not want that. I still want quite a lot of details. I think I'll go for that. You can see what it looks like compared to earlier if you uncheck the preview box here. This is what it looked like before, and this is what it looks like after. I like to add a slightly angular object like this, that balances the other soft-shaped flowers and shapes. So I'll go for this one. I'm hitting okay. Now I want to test and see what my pattern looks like after giving it these details. As you remember, I ungrouped the parts in the repeat earlier. I start by selecting all objects and click control G to group them all again, and then drag the repeat into swatches to create my new pattern. Now I'll test and see how it looks like by making another rectangle and fill it with the latest pattern. I'll make another one to compare with. This is what the pattern look like first, and this is what my finished pattern looks like. A little more depth and life, if you're asking me. All that's left now is to export my pattern so that I can upload it to my online portfolio. I'll show you how to do that in the next and final part. 7. 6. Export: Now I want to take my pattern and export a picture of it, that I can upload to my portfolio or share on my social media channels. Here's a rectangle of my finished pattern, but I want to make a square image, since I want to post it on Instagram, and I also work with square images in my online portfolio. I delete the rectangle and go to the rectangle tool. I click and at the same time as I pull out my shape, I hold down the Shift key, so it becomes a perpendicular square. Fill it with my pattern. Here I can right-click, go to Transform, and Move, to move the position of my pattern, if I want to. Make sure to uncheck Transform Objects, because I just want to move the pattern itself, and then I change the position up here. Maybe something like that, click "Okay." You can also go to Transform Scale to reduce and enlarge the pattern if you want to. As you can see, I get some white lines here in my pattern, but it's only here in Illustrator. It will not be visible on your exported image later, so don't worry about them. I was quite happy with the scale I had before, so I click "Cancel." The fastest way to export is to use a tool called Asset Export. If you do not have it open, you'll find it under Window Asset Export. I just take what I want to export and drag it into the box here. I can rename the file. I'll call it pattern. Here I choose which format I want to export as, I go for PNG. Then I go up here and click on these three little lines and select Format Settings. Here you can click on the format you want to export as, and make sure that Anti-alias is set to Art Optimized. Otherwise, you risk getting the white lines in your exported image and you do not want that. It can be set to Type Optimized by default, but select Art Optimized instead. Click "Save Settings." Here you can select the resolution for your image. For the web, 72 PPI usually is enough. If you were to send something to a customer, I would set it higher than that to get a sharper image, but for Instagram, for example, 72 is just fine. Make sure your image is selected, and then click "Export." Choose where you want to save your image. There will be good, like that. Then my picture is saved. Now I can locate it. There it is, and here I have my picture of my pattern. As you can see, I did not get the white lines that appeared in Illustrator. It looks seamless and good. That was it for this class. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you have learned something new and feel inspired to create lots of new patterns. Feel free to upload a picture of your finished pattern or share a processed picture if you want, so I can see what you have created. Until we meet again. Take care.