Transcripts
1. Make Terrazzo Tile Patterns in Illustrator Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch Class, terrazzo patterns made easy in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic Design for Lunch, is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. In this class, I'll show you how to make a series of terrazzo patterns in Illustrator. Now if you're curious, terrazzo is a traditional flooring material. It consists of chips of marble or granite set in concrete and then polished to give a smooth surface. You get the look of little chips or little tiles in a background color. These days, terrazzo patterns are everywhere, they're very much on trend. Now most people who teach you how to make terrazzo start by making the shapes, sometimes hundreds of them. Now I have a really short attention span and I don't want to be sitting at my computer drawing shapes all day, so I found a different way. I have two methods for you to shortcut the process of making the chips. In fact, both of them don't require you to draw a single shape. I call it terrazzo without tears, you get great terrazzo patterns quickly and easily and no one's going to know that you didn't draw everything yourself. Since we're not doing hours of drawing, we can spend our time together learning cool illustrated techniques instead. I'll show you two of my favorite scripts to help you re-color the chips, and explain how to install scripts, because you're going to want to use these in other projects too. We'll source color schemes online, and we'll use a photo as the basis of one of the terrazzo techniques too. I think you're going to find it really interesting to see how you can turn any photo into a series of chips to use for a terrazzo pattern. Now if you really do want to draw some shapes, then the last pattern in the class will actually require you to draw some shapes. So be warned. I have a couple of ideas in the class for using your terrazzo patterns too. Enough from me, if you're ready, let's get started making terrazzo patterns in Illustrator.
2. Pt 1 Create the Shapes from a Photo: One of the difficulties that I foresaw in creating terrazzo patterns was creating the actual shapes. It could take you quite a lot of time and effort to make the individual shapes. I don't think that it's worth it when you could do it another way. I'm going to show you one of those ways. Let's switch across to this browser window where I have opened an image from unsplash.com. I'm going to give you the link to download this image. What we're going to do is we're going to make our terrazzo tile elements from this photograph. Now the reason why I chose this photograph was for the bottom part of it. I'm not going to use the top, but I'm going to use from about the middle down. The reason is that the photograph has a lot of light areas and then there are little splashes of color. The technique that I'm going to use to turn this photograph into tiles is going to use these colors that are in this lighter area and these little splashes of color to make individual shapes. They're going to be solid colors, so you're not going to recognize this photograph in the final presentation, but it is going to help you make those tiles and it's going to be pretty automatic. Let's switch across to Illustrator. I'm going to create a brand new document. I'll choose file and new. My document is going to be the size of my screen, so that's 1920 by 1080, but you can make yours any size you like. Into this document, I'm going to place the photograph that I have downloaded. I'll choose file and then place. I'll navigate to locate the photograph wherever it is that I've stored it, select it, make sure that link is disabled and click place. Now I can click and drag to import the photograph and place it on the current art board. Now, Illustrator assumes when you add a photograph to a document that you possibly want a trace it, and so all the image trace options are already visible up here. There's also a crop image option in the most recent versions of Illustrator. I am going to assume that you may not be using the most recent version of Illustrator, so I'm not going to crop the image at this stage. You could, if you wanted to speed up the process a little bit, but we're not going to trace the image yet. We need to do some work with it. To do that with the image selected we'll choose effect and then texture, and then stained glass. Now the reason why I've chosen this stained glass filter should immediately be apparent to you. What we've got is the black lead, if you like, of this stained glass effect. We've got lots and lots of different shaped elements. Now, over here in this side of the panel, you've got the options for adjusting what you're seeing. You could increase the light intensity, which would lighten the image a little bit and if you go the other way, it'll darken it a little bit. I'm only concerned with what I'm seeing in the bottom part of the image because that's the only part I'm ultimately going to be using. Now the cell size is going to adjust how big these shapes are, so if you want less shapes, then you can make your cell size bigger. If you want more shapes, then make it smaller. When we've got the cell size large enough, you can see that each of these shapes is colored with a single color. We're just borrowing some of the colors from the underlying photograph and using it to make these cells and this is a really nice shortcut for creating a terrazzo pattern. I want quite a few of these shapes, I'm going to wind my cell size down a bit, to probably into the twenties, maybe around 26. Now the border thickness is the amount of this black and how thick it is. Now, I want it to be fairly thick because if I reduce it, then I'm going to have less space between each of these shapes. The terrazzo pattern that I want to create is going to have a bit more space between individual shapes. I want my border thickness to be quite thick because I'm going to delete it in a minute. When I delete it, I'm going to be left with a tile, so I'm going to have more space between the tiles. If you think in terms of border thickness as being how much space do you want to have between each individual tile. Once you've got the look that you want, you can just click okay. Now we have the stained glass effect, applied to our photograph, and now it's time to go ahead and trace it. I'm going to image trace. The default image trace is always going to be in black and white. We'll go straight to the image trace panel. Just going to drag it into position here. The first thing I'll do is turn preview off, because if you don't turn preview off, every change you make in this dialogue, Illustrator is going to go and retrace this image and it's going to take ages. Save yourself a bit of time and turn preview off. Let's go and select color. I'm going to choose a limited color palette, I only want 30 colors. This is a disclosure triangle so I can click on it to expand it to show what's underneath. I'm going to set my path and my corners to a sort of middle value, something around about 70. I've got 68 and 69 here. For noise, I'm going to go the other way. I'm going to a low value of about 18. Now these aren't set in concrete, you can just use whatever values you like, but you want to go sort of mid to high on paths and corners and go the opposite direction on noise. That's a typical setting for this dialogue, is taking paths and corners together in one direction and noise in the completely opposite direction. Now we've got all our settings, I'm going to click here on preview. Illustrator is going to go ahead and complete the trace. Now this tracing process can take a little bit of time depending on your computer, and it also is a big sack on your computer's system. If you are having trouble with this, if for example, Illustrator's crashing on you, then what you'll want to do if you're on a Windows computer is restart your computer first of all. Windows has memory lag problems and it will behoove you to start afresh with your Windows system if you're having difficulties. The other thing to do is to close down anything at all that you are not using. If you're not using your browser, if you're not using your email, then close them down to give your computer the access to the maximum number of cycles that are available, so Illustrator is not having to fight for computer resources. If all of that fails, what you could do is resize your images, for example in Photoshop before you start in Illustrator. Also remove any part of the image that you don't plan to use, so you're working with a smaller image. If you resize it down to a much smaller size, you're still going to get the cells, they're still going to look fine, but you're not working on such a huge image. Illustrator is going to be able to work on it much more easily. That said, I'm now done, so I'm going to close the image trace dialogue. Now this has been traced, but it's not individual shapes yet. We have to click the expand button here to break it out into individual shapes. Now let's go to the last pallet and see what we've got. In the last panel we've got a group. Inside the group are only individual shapes. Well, we'll click on the group option here. We selected the group and we'll choose object and then ungroup, because we want to break everything out of the group. The next thing is to locate the stained glass effect, and you'll probably find that at the very, very end. Here it is, it's a compound path and it's big and it's black. When I select this, you will see that the whole shape seems to have been selected. Well it hasn't, none of these color pieces have been selected, just the black, just the lead if you like. If I now press delete, I'm going to remove it from the image. You can see the beginnings of all of those little terrazzo tile shapes that we want to use. Now as I said earlier, I'm not going to use the blue at the top. Let's go to the selection tool. I'll select either, pretty much the top half of this image, and I'll press delete because I don't want those shapes at all. Now I can move what I've got left into the middle of the documents so I can start to look at what I've got. Now we could make a pattern out of this, but there are a few problems here. I've got some very small tiles around the edges, and I'd like my tiles to be a little bit more varied in shape. In the next video, we're going to attend to just that.
3. Pt 2 Create the pattern: To continue our work on this terrazzo white pattern, we're going to select and remove the objects at the very edge of this shape. We've already got rid of the ones at the top, but we're going to take off the ones at the side, and that will remove any of those smaller fragments that are looking pretty obvious. So the next thing to do is to start working with these shapes and we're going to scale them. So I'll choose object transform and then I'll choose transform each. Now the way that transform each dialog works, is that it allows you to make some random changes to things. So I'm going to click here on random, and I'm going to adjust the scale of these shapes. So I'm going to type them down very, very small, well at least some of them. So I'm going to type in here to start off with 20 percent and I'm going to do that for height and width. What that does because I've got the random option selected here, is it's going to adjust the size of these to somewhere between 20 percent and 100 percent and it's going to do randomly, and so you can see that the shapes are breaking up in terms of size. Now we can also move them, so you may want to adjust the horizontal. So I'm going to put in here like 20 pixels horizontally and 20 pixels vertically. What that'll do is randomly move these shapes, a number of pixels horizontally and vertically, and it's going to be random. So one shape might be moved nothing at all, and one shape might be moved quite a lot, and that's breaking up this pattern a lot. When you get a look that you like, you can just click "Okay". Now when I click away, you can say already we've got something that's looking a whole lot more like a terrazzo pattern. Now if that's not enough of a movement and a re-sizing for you. You could go back and do it over again. So again, just select everything and then go back and choose object, transform, transform each, and then adjust it again, you might go smaller, you may do a bigger movement. You can do all sorts of things and that will readjust the pieces so you're getting more of an effect, I'm going to do that and just see what I get. Well actually I like it quite a lot, so I think I'll leave it the way it is right now. Now my pattern pieces got quite a lot of really small pieces. If we have a look in here, there are some really tiny pieces. I'm going to show you later how you could get rid of those if they concern you so that you could use just the larger pieces. So for this, I'm going to make sure that I save my file at this point so I could go ahead and get those smaller pieces out of the way if I wanted to later on. But for now, let's say that that's what we've got and we want to make a pattern out of it. Well, I'll select over all of the pieces and choose object and then pattern make. Now for this I'm going to choose the brick by column option, and I'm going to have my brick offset as one half. The reason for this is that this is going to give me a half drop repeat, and it's going to be a huge half drop repeat. You're not going to easily see where these elements are going to repeat because the repeat is here and here, and the next time we'll see it is over here. So this is a really large pattern, to get it looking the way we want it to look because there are some lines here that I'm seeing. We're going to need to move it. So what I suggest that you do is you choose show tile edge so you can see where the edges are. The other option you could do is to dim copies. So you're dimming the copies to something like 40 percent that will allow you to see your original pattern tile and the copies, and so you can close up this gap. I'm going to link the width and the height. We're going to start reducing this, to change the width and height, I'm clicking in the box here and I'm holding the Shift key as I am pressing the down Arrow key, that's going to move everything 10 pixels at a time. That's just going to speed things up a little bit. If you find your computer's slowing down, you may want to enter values in here. So I'll go straight to that value. It's a little bit quicker. I'm going to undo my copies. So I can see if things are looking pretty right and if I show my tile edge, I'll be able to work out where the overlaps are, but this is looking pretty good. So the zoom tool works in the pattern dialogue, and I could also increase the number of copies that are visible. This is not having any effect on the pattern at all, but it's just allowing me to have a good look at how my pattern looks. That looks fantastic. I'm really pleased with this. So if you're happy with it, just click done. I'll take the elements that are making up my pattern and move them out of the way for the moment, I'll add a rectangle that is the same size as my art board. In my case, that's 1920 by 1080. I'm going to position that over the edge of the art board. Now I can just check that it is centered by checking these x and y values of the top-left corners, so they're now in position. I have my fill selected, so I'll go and click on my new pattern. I can scale it by choosing object transform scale. Then I can adjust the scale of the pattern. I'll turn preview on. I'll turn transform objects off because I don't want to change the scale of the objects I may want to change the scale of my pattern. So I'm going to make it 60 percent because that will allow us to see any obvious repeats if there are repeat issues. This pattern is looking really quite extraordinarily good. So there is a terrazzo pattern now we haven't had to do any re-coloring because the colors that actually came through the original image are pretty good. It's got a really nice pattern look to it. So if you can find the right image to use, you may find that creating a terrazzo pattern like this is just the matter of a few minutes worth of work and you won't even have to recolor it because everything that you need in terms of color and distribution of color is going to come from your source photograph.
4. Pt 3 Terrazzo from a Texture: Another way to quick start creating interactive style pattern, is to find something that has the shapes that you can work with, and grunge textures are just great for this. I found this lithograph texture which is a grunge texture background, and it's free here at Vecteezy. I'm going to give you the download link for it, but there are a lot of textures here at Vecteezy that you could use. This was just one that I chose to use. We're going to download it and I'm just using the free license for it. Now, on a path say, this is going to download as a zip file. It's also going to obviously download as a zip file on the Mac, but on the Mac you'll just double-click the file that is downloaded and it should be automatically unzipped for you. On the Pasi , you're going to have to take an extra step, so let's just get it downloaded here. I'll click to show it in the folder here it is, I'll double-click on it and then extract all the files. That'll extracted into a folder and inside that folder is an AI file, that's the one I'm going to name. I'm going to take it and open it in Illustrator. Now, inside the file I'm going to be some bits and pieces so let's just have a quick look and say what we got with this file, because not everything will we need. Well, there's a group of elements at the bottom which is this Vecteezy text at the very bottom. It's really hard to say but it's there, so we don't need that. There's also a group of elements here and that's just the branding for this so again, we don't need that. We have one group left over which is going to be all of the shapes here, and what we're going to do is break everything out. I'm going to select my group and then I'll go to object ungroup because I'm going to break everything out of that group. Is just going to be easy to handle that way. Now, I'm also going to roll down to the very bottom of this group because whenever you get a texture like this, there's a really good chance that it hasn't been traced particularly well, and in this case what's happened is that the person who traced it left behind a whole heap of objects. They've got a shape but you can see they've got no fill and no stroke. There are a lot of them and they're here at the bottom of this group, and so what we need to do is to delete them. What I'll do is select one of them, check that it has no fill and no stroke, then I'll go to Select and Same, and I'll go to Fill and Stroke. That will then select every single one of these shapes that for all intents and purposes is inside the document, but doing absolutely nothing. I'll just press delete and that will get rid of them. The only thing that's left in this document are actually shapes that are filled and that's what we want to work with. But there's a lot of content here and this is going to grind your computer to a halt spectacularly. If you don't have the latest and greatest computer, and we don't need all of that. What I want is a bit that's in about here. What I'll do is start grabbing the bits I don't want and just press delete. I'm just going to whittle it back to a smaller number of shapes. I'm also going to take them off this side because of this side, I run the risk of having shapes that have a straight line on the very left edge because that's how they've been cropped earlier. I want my shapes to be uneven, so I'm going to select whatever it's down that edge and just delete it, this is what I'm left with. Let's zoom in and have a look. We've got lots and lots of small shapes, we're not quite at Trouts Hotel stage yet, but we're on the way. What I'll do is select either all of the shapes and I'm going to start making them larger. Object Transform, Transform Each. I'm going to turn preview on so I can see what I'm doing, and I'm going to try for something like 300 percent size increase on these vertical and horizontal. Now, at this stage, I could take that as my scale increase or I could use random. It doesn't really matter which you choose, you're just looking for something in terms of a Turret tile pattern. I'm going to disable random at this stage. I haven't gone for an overall 300 percent scale, there's no point in moving anything if I don't have random selected because I'm going to move everything, and I'm not going to get any differential in movement. The next step I'm going to add some movement, for now let's just click Okay. Everything is now much larger than it was, I'm going to re-select over everything, Object, Transform, Transform Each. Now, preview and this 300 percent scale was set when I last close this dialogue so that's why it looks like this, everything has been increased in size. Going to wind this back to about 200, and this time I'm going to hit it with the random option. I still get some larger tiles, but not all of the tiles are going to be large enough. This is going to give me the potential for an interesting effect later on lots of overlap paces. I think that's going to be great. I am however now going to start moving them. The reason why I'm moving them is that hard edges around this tile edge going to be harder to make into a seamless repeating patterns. If you can start moving things so they're breaking away from this edge a little bit, it's going to make making the patent later on a whole lot easier. I just don't think I've moved them far enough. Because we've got random selected, not all of them are being moved 80 pixels, they're being moved somewhere between zero and 80 pixels horizontally and zero and 80 pixels vertically, but each pace is being moved a random amount. You can see we're breaking up the edges, so I'm really happy with that, I'll just click Okay. At this stage, if you see some overly large paces, you may want to grab them and delete them. For example, this is an overly large pace, I'm going to take it away. This one too, you just might need to go on a bit of a fishing expedition to save you actually to have an overly large pace, or whether you've just got groups of paces. If you can't get them at this stage, it might actually become a bit more apparent later on as to the fact that some of these are just big paces, and some of them are lots of little ones and so it might be easy to get rid of the ones that you don't want in just a minute. But right now, we've got the basis of our Trots Hotel, so I would go and save this at this stage. We'll want to use File and then Save As so that we can save this file with a different name and we're not overwriting the original. I'm calling this pieces from Lithograph texture because that's pretty much what it is. It's just the pieces from that texture file. At this point we're in a different position to the position we're in with the last Trots Hotel pattern that we created, because we actually inherited the colors for the pattern from the photograph. In this case, all we've got is black pieces. Let's have a look in the next video how we're going to deal with free coloring because we want to do that as easily as we can.
5. Pt 4 Color the Terrazzo Pattern: The next step in making this a terrazzo pattern is to recolor it, and what you want to do is select shapes randomly, but there are probably 1000 shapes here and selecting shapes randomly is going to be an exercise that's going to take you a long time. That is unless you get some help along the way. This is what I call help, it's a script and that's called random select and it can do all the work for you. I use a script a lot of the time and a lot of projects. I think it's a very valuable script to learn how to use and to install properly. We're going to give you the download link for this script and you'll go to this page and click download. I've downloaded a few times, once it downloads, it's only going to take a couple of seconds to download, because it's a tiny, tiny file, you'll open the location that you downloaded it into and on a Windows machine, double-click on it and you want to go ahead and extract all the files. What we want is the JavaScript file. Once you've done that, navigate through the folder hierarchy until you find random select dot jsx right-click it, and choose copy. You'll do that on a Mac as well, it's just a little bit easier to unzip on a Mac we just need to double-click the file and unzips automatically. Now on a Mac, you'll want to go to your applications folder and locate your version of Illustrator. Navigate through that, you're looking for your presets folder and then scripts on a PC we're going to our C Drive and we'll go to Program Files, Adobe. Locate the folder for your version of Illustrator, in my case is CC 2019, don't go for this scripting, that's not the right one or the same one that we need. What we want is to go to presets and then select your language version for me, it's English US, but you'll have a language version appropriate to your version of Illustrator and then you'll look for scripts. This is where you place your script file, so you right-click and just paste it. Now I've already done that, so I don't need to do it again. I'd suggest at this stage that you close and reopen Illustrator and the reason for that is that if you close and reopen Illustrator as soon as you do when you go to File and then scripts, you'll find random select is in the list. If you don't close and reopen Illustrated than you're going to have to go and get the file. Since you're probably going to need it a few times, it would be worth restarting Illustrator. To run the script, I suggest that you actually select all the objects first. It's just going to run a whole lot quicker. Then choose file and then Scripts, and choose random select, you need to select what percentage of these selected objects you want to leave selected. At the moment we've got a 100 percent of our objects as selected and if we choose 50, then in a minute, half of them are going to be deselected leaving half of them still selected, I'll click Okay. Now, depending on how many objects you have selected and the speed of your computer that might take a few seconds, if you run into difficulties with your computer having trouble keeping up, think about doing this, you could close down all the applications that you are not currently using. If you're using a Windows computer then I would close down the entire computer and restart it from scratch. Windows suffers from something called memory leakage and over time, you might find that the memory in your computer is compromised because of that leaking issue. Restarting the computer just sets it all back to fresh. If you still have problems, then get rid of some of these objects. You probably don't need this quantity of objects and you'll be able to create a perfect terrazzo pattern with even a quarter of these objects. If it's really so bad, just trash some of these objects and just go with a corner was worth of them. But I've now selected 50 percent of my objects, if I go to the last panel, you'll see that some of these objects are selected and some of them are not, and 50 percent of them are selected and 50 percent are not. At this stage we can go and re-color them. I'm just going to double click on the color option here and I'm just going to choose a pale pink for now, because one of the things you might think of doing before you actually start making selections of those objects is to go and get some colors to use. Now, I've found that a handy selection in the color theme, go to Window and then color themes. These are accessed through what was the old Adobe color options. We'll go to explore and if we just type something even like terrazzo in here, we'll get color themes that have a terrazzo look about them. You can just click the little icon here and choose Add to swatches so that you can go and get some colors that you would like to use for your terrazzo pattern. I'm just scrolling through here to say what I might like and just grabbing them into my swatches palette. We have an idea for this one, so I'm just going to grab it at this stage. There are plenty of terrazzo patterns there, but you can look up anything that you like. You might look up tropical if you want to do a tropical theme terrazzo or a wine theme and you're going to get wine colors, there's plenty to find there. I've added these additional colors, which will give me some more colors to work with. I've got my pink down, let's go and select a single black one. I am going to use it to select all the other black ones. With it selected all go to Select Same Fill Color, and now I have selected all the black shapes. That's half of what shapes they were in the original design. We'll go back to our random select script. I'll go back and this time I'll just take 50 percent of the black ones. Now I'll color them with a different color. Then we can go back and again select the black ones. Now, you can quick start that selection by going over here and just choosing fill color. Then this option here will allow you to select all the similar colors. Now we have selected all of the black colors again. Let's choose our script and let's again run it and get 50 percent of what was left. Once we've got that, we can apply a color to those. Now at this stage, if you think you've got too much pink, go and select your pink and go and select all your pink paces and for example, you may want to just grab 50 percent of those and find a different color for them. Perhaps in this case, a darker pink. You can continue to work on this, selecting the colored tiles, making sure that you select everything that is colored that way and then going and running your script and getting some proportion of those tiles selected, leaving the others unselected and so now you can go and color them with a different color. Once you've done that, you're ready go ahead and create your pattern. I'm going to zoom back out with Control or Command zero. I'll select either these elements and choose object and then pattern Meg. Again, we're going to choose brick by column and do a half offset, because that's going to give us the largest possible pattern pace. Going to link these two together so that I'm going to adjust the width and height together, and just start bringing them in. I'm holding the Shift key as I'm tapping the down arrow key to decrease the width. That's also decreasing the height as well. Once I've got it pretty close to where it needs to be, I might need to adjust the height and leaves the widths just as it was. I'm going to disable this option and let's just bring in the height, because I think it needs to be a little bit less in height. I'm going to zoom out so I can just double-check and see how it's looking. I'm going to show more of the paces, so I'm going to go for a 9 by 9, so it's a little bit easier for me to say what things are looking like. This black pace is showing up really badly, let me just choose show tile edge so I know where the black paces at actually has to be in here. Let me see if I can go and select it and remove it. If you find a paces really obvious in the repeat, the way that you can deal with it, it is either remove it or re-color it into something that it's a little bit less obvious. When you're happy with what you've got, just click Done. I'm going to grab always paces and move them out of the way. Let's go and create a rectangle that is the size of the art board here and let's fill it with a new pattern. Control or Command zero to zoom in. Now this pattern could use perhaps a little bit of work because I am actually seeing some repeats here. It might be [inaudible] me to do a little bit of work, perhaps remove these orange pieces that are showing up really obviously here. If you think that's the case, just double-click on your pattern and that will open it up automatically for you so that you can start making some changes to it. I've got my tile edge showing, I know that this was one of the pieces that was worrying me a bit, this orange one here. I can select it and delete it, it was actually a few orange pieces all stacked up on top of each other and while I'm here, if I see any other problems, I can just select and delete those as well. Once you're happy, just click done and the pattern itself will be updated, so too will the pattern inside this shape. While having created our pattern, we might say at this stage, what would it look like if we were to use a different color scheme? I'm going to select the entire object and go to the recolor artwork tab. Now I grabbed these terrazzo style color groups earlier. What I can do is just click on one of those and I'll see what it looks like when it's applied to my design and you can experiment with different ones of these, that one's looking really good, I really like that a lot. If you find something you really like just click Okay and then you'll get a patent pace with that coloring added to your swatches panel, because illustrated when you use the re-color artwork tool, to re-color a patterned tile, keeps the original pattern tile for you and gives you a newly recolored one, so you're not losing the original pattern tile when you re-color something. Of course, we can use that as a starting point for another re-color job if we want to. Again, if you like that, go and save it, you'll see that black isn't being remapped, because it doesn't have a little line here. If you want to remap it, just click on it to add it to the color harmony. Now if you want to do something like rotate the colors, then you can also rotate the black around. You might get more black or less black just depending on how the colors were set up in the first place, but here we're using this basic color scheme, but by rotating the colors around, we're getting different effects and anytime you find something you like, and I've just found something I like, just click Okay. You don't have to save the changes to the color swatch group, but you'll get another pattern colored that way. That was the one we just started with and this is the one that were created by rotating some colors around. That's another way of getting a really quick start on creating your terrazzo pattern is using a grunge texture of some sort and then just borrowing those shapes and doing things with them.
6. Pt 5 Terrazzo pattern with larger tiles: It's not always the case that your toronto Star patterns are going to have objects that vary a lot. Let's have a look at creating something where the size of our tiles is actually quite even across the design. I'm going to choose File and then New, I'm just going to create a document 2,000 by 1,200 pixels in size, just roughly screen size. I'm going to import a photo to use. Some of this is going to be repeated stuff that we've seen earlier, but perhaps used in just a slightly different way. Then I have another couple of techniques that are a little bit different. Let's go and choose place. I'm just going to use a photograph. I have another photograph here from unsplash.com and I'm just going to place it in here. I don't actually want it to be the full size of the art board. We're just going to use this photograph and we're going to do the exact same thing with that stain glass filter, but it doesn't matter too much at this stage, what photograph that you've got. I've just chosen a photograph. In here, I do want to fit it on the screen so I can see what I've got here and what I'm aiming for is some quite large tile. I want large tiles like this and I want a very thick border because I want to be able to offset those tiles and little bit later on. Basically the look I'm going for here is quite large cell size. I've got mine set to 44 and a border thickness of 20. I'm just going to click Okay, and I'm not worried about the color at all. I didn't get that image for the color, I really just got it for the stained glass effect. But we will have to trace this image. Let's go to image trace, because we want to vectorize it, and we'll go here to the image trace panel. In this case, I just want to get the tiles out. I'm going to go for color, but I'm going for a very small color palette. It's best actually to turn preview off so you don't do it as I've done and have Illustrator, go and do the traits when you're not quite ready, perhaps for the trace to be done, better to turn preview off and make your settings. In fact, this looks like a pretty good trace to me. What I'm looking for basically is just the shapes and this is a good trace. I'm going to go with it. I'll click Expand because we need to turn it from a bitmap that has a tracing effect applied to it to the actual vector shapes. We've got our image now and we've got our vector shapes. Let's go to the last pallet and just see what we have here. We have a group and inside the group are going to be all the shapes that belong here to this traced element. What we'll do is go to the very bottom because we need to pick up this black, and pick it up and delete it. That's got rid of the black, leaving behind just the tiles. But I think there is also some white here. Let me just see, yes, there's an element here, another one at the bottom that I needed to get rid of. Typically just going down to the very bottom of your panel of objects, once you've done a trace, will help you find any big elements like the big sets of black and white that was in this. Let's just ungroup this by selecting it and choose Object Ungroup. Now we've got a whole series of shapes. Let me just make those black or a single color. We'll select over them, double-click here, and I'm going to choose black as my color. Because we're really not worried at this stage about color at all. We've got a few missing tiles, that's where they were black as well, doesn't matter. They're not going to be causing us issues. Now we will take off the edge tiles because they've got straight edges and we don't want straight edges. I'm just going to select over the very edge just to remove any of these edge tile, so we now have a rough edge. We're going back to our transform edge. Object, Transform, Transform Each. Now in this case I would like a little bit of variety in my tiles, but not very much. I'm going to choose a 120 percent as my setting here and random. Some of them are going to be taken up to a 120 percent of what they were. You might choose something a little bit less. It's really what you want out of this design. I do want a little bit of variety, but not a lot. I do want to start moving there. I do want this to happen, I want the tiles to start moving over each other a little bit so that we're not getting those very even stained glass look, stained-glass edges happening. I'm just going to click Okay. Then I'll go back and do that again with Object, Transform, and Transform Each. Now in this case, I don't want to resize them, so I'm going to take that back to just 100. If you type in 100 here, they're not going to change in size, but I do want them to continue to move a little bit. I'm going to do another 10 pixels and 10 pixels and just click, Okay. Right now, I'm happy with these being my tiles, but I do want to recolor them and I want to recolor them as easily as possible. Let's go to Window and then Color Themes, and let's go and get some Terrazzo color themes. Now I've already opened up the panel here. I've already gone looking for terrazzo color scheme. Let's just focus on the panel and see if we can get some color schemes to use. Anytime that you find one that you like and you'd like to try out, just click on the little three dots here and add it to your swatches panel. You probably want to take more rather than less. Once you've got your set of colors, you are ready to apply them to the image. Now the last time that we did this, we used a script that, that was a random select script. The script was set up such that we would select over the objects that we wanted to choose from, and then when the script ran, it would say, how many of these objects do you want to remain selected? If we chose 25 percent, then 75 percent would be dropped and only 25 percent would be still selected. Well this time we're going to use a different script. Now this is the script we're going to use, and the way the script works is that you select all the objects that you want to recover, and then you select the colors you want to use. You run the script and it just applies those colors. There's images are all dying on me right now. But basically what you're going to do is come here and download this script and you're going to unzip it and you're going to install it in exactly the same way as we installed the previous script. Now, I've already installed mine, but I haven't restarted Illustrator, I'm going to go and do that and we'll come back when we're ready to run the script.
7. Pt 6 Recolor the pattern: So having re-started illustrator and re-opened by far, I'm going to press Control or Command A to select all of the shapes. Now I'm going to choose the colors I'm going to use. I'm going to use all the colors in this swatch and I'm going to add some additional colors. I'm just holding down the control key as I'm adding some additional colors, I don't want anything too dark, so I'm avoiding that dark color there. Once I've got the colors selected I want to use and all the shapes that I want to apply the colors to, I'll choose file and then scripts. We're going to use this time random swatches fill. That just fills each of those selections with one of those colors and it does it in a random way. So now we're ready to create a patent from this. Again, I'm going to select everything. I'll size this down a little bit, I'm just holding the Shift and Alt keys to size it down in proportion that shift and option on a Mac. Again, object pattern make. Now again, I'm going to make a really large half drop repeat, so for that we need brick by column and we need a half offset. Going to click this icon so that I'm going to adjust the width and height at the same time just to get started. Once things start moving in, and I can see that the edge here is closed up pretty well. So I'm pretty happy with that, I'm going to deselect this and start moving in the height alone. If I think I'm pretty good there, I'm going to zoom back out, just so I can check and say that I'm not seeing any obvious edges or obvious problems. I'd also like to increase the number of copies, of course, that's got nothing at all to do with the pattern, but the additional number of copies just lets me see if I've got repeats. Now I've got some indication here that I can see where a repeat is, but it's an actual fact running through this part of the tile here. Now if I wanted to, I could go back perhaps and try to adjust some colors in here, but I'm pretty happy with this. I'm just going to continue forward, so I'll click done. These are the elements that went to make the pattern, so I am going to grab all of those, just going to move them across to the edge there. I'm going to group them because that will just tuck them away where they won't be able to get lost because there's a lot of them. I'm going to drag out to create a rectangle that is the size of the art board, which for me is 2,000 by 1,100. I'm just going to align this to the art board, just make sure I've got aligned to up books selected and choose horizontal lines, center and vertical align center. Select the fill or target the fill, and let's just fill the shape with our pattern. So that's the pattern, that's the shape, that's the look I've got. I want to do a couple of things before I leave. I just going to move everything out of the way here. One of the questions I get a lot is how do you add a background color to a pattern? So I'm going to show you how to do that now. That's why I've got this sort of empty area here. Because what I'm going to do is drag this pattern out of the pattern's watch and just into this empty area. I'm going to the last pallet, and this is my pattern here at the top. This is the rectangle over here, and this is the group of objects and the pattern is at the very, very top. I'm going to I open up this group, and I'm going to the very bottom of that group because what's going to be at the bottom of that group is a no fill, no stroke rectangle. Every time got to obey that, that's the rules of making patterns. So this is a no fill, no stroke rectangle and it's the very last thing in the group. Well, I'm going to make a duplicate of it, so I'm going to drag it onto the new icon. I'm going to make sure that I have selected the top one. So this is a no fill, no stroke rectangle. The one I'm about to fill with color absolutely has to be the one that is second to bottom. If you make it the bottom one, it's not going to work. The pattern's not going to work. Now I'm going to just fill this. I fill it with a color and I can adjust the color if I want to a little bit, but it's filled with a color. Now I'm going back up here and I'm going to make sure that I closed down my group and that I select my group and see everything selected here. I've got the Selection Tool selected, so what I'll do is just drag and drop this into the swatches panel. Now I have the exact same pattern as I had earlier but this time, the patent actually has a background. I'm just going to press delete to get rid of that, let's go back and find our art board over here, let's select the rectangle here, and let's fill it with a second version of the pattern and this second version of the pattern actually brings with it a background color. Which means that when we go to re-color it we're going to be recoloring not only all of the tiles, but potentially also the background. So you can do things like randomly change the color order. So you're using the same colors as you were, but you're randomly changing where they're associated in the document. So you're making a different color of the background and a different color for each of the tiles. Or you can go to one of these sets of turrets or colors and apply that to your image. Once you've done that, you can rotate that one around as well or go and select a different one. There's plenty of variety of things that you can do now with this turrets or pattern. You've got a pattern this time with larger tiles, less space between them, we've done it with that same stained-glass filter because it just works so well for getting the shapes. We've got nice edgy shapes, they are slightly overlap, there is uneven spaces between them as they would be if it was a real pattern, we've been able to recolor it as well and add a background. So we've got lots of possibilities here for a whole series of patterns. This time where all of the little tile paces in the turrets pattern are closer in size to each other than they were in the past ones that we created. You've also seen another one of those handy scripts that random swatch fill and you could use both of that made sense to you in creating your Toronto pattern.
8. Pt 7 Terrazzo with Tiles that don't overlap: It's possible to create a Terrazzo pattern where the elements don't actually overlap, but it is quite a bit more difficult. We're going to look at that now. I've already added a photo to this document. I chose this because it doesn't have lots of blacks and I'm going to choose again Effect, Texture, Stained glass. I'm going to scale this so that I can set it on the screen and I want to make sure that I don't have any gradients, if I can help it. So I am going to decrease my light intensity. Because I found that sometimes with this particular image, I do get some gradients. I am just going to adjust a little bit actually to pull that out of blacks because I don't want those to be black either. I think that's a pretty good compromise there. I've got a large cell size and the large border thickness. This is going to be, as I said, quite difficult to make this particular pattern. So at least you want to start the first time you do this with really big tiles so that you have a minimum of them to work with. Click "ok". Now we already know what we're going to say in the last pallet. We've got an image that has an effect applied to it. So we need to try this. I'll go to Image trace. I'll go to the Tracing panel. I'm going to set this to color. I have got some gradients in here, but I've got a means of getting rid of those. Let's just go with those so I can show you what to do. We are going to click to expand this and we'll ungroup it as well. So select the group and choose Ungroup. The very bottom of the last palette is going to be the lead. This is going to be the black elements, the lead for the stained glass, and the second to last one, sometimes we'll have something, this is actually white. So I'm actually going to get rid of that as well. Let's deal with these elements have sort of two colors. So what I'm going to do is select both of them and just to unite them. There are a few of them like this. You can unite them or you could use the Shape Builder tool. So I'm just going to grab these tool. The alternative is to grab the Shape Builder tool and just drag over them to join them together. But you'll probably find that the "Unite" option is just as quick. These aren't uniting properly. Sometimes you can get a better unite through the Shape Builder tool then you can through the "Unite" option. Just be aware of that. If I select over the shapes, I'll be able to say if there are any extras and there's one here, that's really hard to say otherwise, but we're going to unite it. Let's just double-check. Everything looks good here. There's another one here that's a problem. It looks like everything is now a single shape. I want to shrink these shapes. So I'm going to choose object Transform and then Transform Each. I want you to reduce them to about 90 percent so there's a bit more space between them. Space I couldn't actually create in the Stained Glass filter because I had already maximized out my spacing. I'm just dropping this down to about 90 percent. I'm turning Random off because I want them all to be dropped down in size and I'll click "ok". But I also do want to move them. So I'm going to move these, I'm going to select them and choose Object Transform and Transform Each. I'm going to move them random amount, so I'm going to use a value of somewhere between probably four and seven. But you can see that the shapes are actually getting smaller again and that is because I still have my scale set to 90. We already reduced this, so we want to leave our scale at a 100 percent now because we don't want to further reduce them. But we do want to move them because I want to get the spaces to be a little bit varied. If you've got your move value sets, I've got eight and seven. You can click "Random" on and off and every time you click "Random" on and off, illustrator re-adjusts. So things that were wrong or joined together perhaps previously, can be un-joined by selecting Random again. Just clicking it until you get something that works for you. This is pretty good. I'll Click "ok". Let's grab all of the shapes. I've already got some colors to use in the Swatches panel. I am going to select a swatch of colors and I'm going to run my scripts on choosing Files, Scripts on choosing RandomSwatchesFill here. Well, that's particularly unattractive, so let's try that again. That's a bit better. The next thing we're going to do is to go and make our pattern so I am going to close everything down here. I'm going to take the top row of shapes out here and the ones down the side. So you want to just grab these very carefully and just take the ones that are down the side and I think I'm going to leave this big one in. I will take all the one's across the bottom. We want to roughen things up. I'll select over the remaining shapes and choose Object, Pattern and then Make. Now in the past we used brick by column and we did it with a half offset. That's going to be really difficult to put together. I suggest that you don't do that. I suggest instead, at least when you're getting used to doing this, that you choose the Grid option, there's no offset here, it's just the grid. I'm going to start bringing these together and just say what happens. I wanted to start closing up the gaps here. I'm turning Show Tile Edge on, so we can see where the elements are, and what we have to do, is fix up the edges. So you'll probably want to leave Show Tile Edges turned on. Let's go in and have a look at the top here. We can select these shapes here, the ones that are inside the tile edges, but we can't select the ones outside because they're down here. This one here, and this one can't be selected because it's over here. So it can be a little bit confusing to work out where everything is, but you can certainly pull this out. What you're going to do is redraw all the ones along the edges. I usually pull them apart a few at a time and then I start redrawing them. Don't worry about the color at this stage because we can fix the color again in a minute. You can work between the top and the bottom of the document and just draw in the shapes. Be careful that your shapes don't have any indents in them because the original shapes didn't have any indents, and so you don't want to create an indent where there wasn't one previously. You can work between the top and the bottom of this document and just draw the shapes. What you're looking to do, is to close up this gap that appears along the top edge of this tile. You want some tiles to go over it. You want things to be a bit more varied so that you don't have the impression that there is a line across here. You're going to have to do that at the top and bottom and also the sides. But when you're doing the bottom, you're actually affecting the top, and when you are doing the left side, you're actually affecting the right side. So you're really sort of only doing two things. You're doing the top and bottom as one, and then you're doing the sides as the other element. Now, you'll probably benefit by learning some keystrokes if you're not.
9. Pt 8 Terrazzo Notebook Cover: Having made your terrazzo pattern, you may be interested in what you could do with it beyond, for example, just creating a series of pattern swatches. We'll have a look at creating this as a notebook cover. Now, I'm going to use these elements. This is not actually a pattern swatch it's things that we used to make a pattern swatch. So I'm going to select over about half of them. I'll choose "Edit copy", so they copy to the clipboard. I'll choose "File,'' ''New" and I'm going to make a notebook that is letter size. I'm going to make it RGB color mode. You'll open up the advanced options and select RGB color. I'll click "Create.'' Now I'll choose "Edit" and then "Paste". Now, these objects are quite small in relation to the cover. In actual fact, I want them to be much, much larger. I'll select everything and choose "Object,'' ''Transform" and then "Scale". The scale is set here to 1650 because I've done this before and I know that I want a really large scale on this. What I want to say is the individual objects that go to make up this terrazzo starting pattern if you like. So you're going to scale it up until you get objects of the size that you want. You could go even larger, should you wish to do so let's go to 1800 and I'll click "Okay". Now everything is selected, so I can start moving things around. What I want to do is to move things around until I see something on this cover that I actually like the look of. As you're working, if you deselect everything, just press Control or Command a to re-select everything that makes it nice and easy. You'll just move things around until you get some objects that you like on the middle of this art board. Now this might take you a few minutes of just testing things out, seeing what you like and seeing what you don't like. Just be aware that it is possible to delete objects if you want to, you probably don't want to be adding any. I like this design, but I also like these elements up here so I'm going to grab the whole lot. I'm just going to click anywhere to just deselect everything and let me go and start my crop. I'll go to the rectangle tool. I'm going to draw out a really large rectangle covering the places that I want to salvage which are up here and making sure that I include the art board. What is going to happen is that everything outside this area is going to be deleted. I will again press Control or Command a to select everything, go across to the Pathfinder palette and click, "Crop." The rectangle itself is sacrificed in that process so you won't have the rectangle left over at the end, but you are going to have everything inside a group. What I'll do is select the group and I'll choose "Object Ungroup", just to make sure that I can now grab some of these elements. There are a few that I like and since this cover is a little bit sparse, I can add in some of these. We'll just scale these down, but I really like them, so I'm just going to place them in. You can build this up a little bit should you wish to do so. Once you've got what you want, you'll go to the rectangle tool again. This time we're going to create a rectangle that is the size of the art board. For letter paper that 612 by 792 and we'll just click "Okay". Now, I need this to be squared up over the top of the art board. Let's go to the align options. Make sure we have "Aligned to art board" selected and I'll horizontally and vertically align it. Now we're going to make our final crop. Again, selecting everything with Control or Command a and going to the Pathfinder palette and click "Crop". So this is going to be our cover, but it's not a terrazzo pattern and doesn't have any elements that are actually terrazzo pattern like. Well, let's go back and get our terrazzo pattern. Let's go back to the document I have open here and I'm going to create a rectangle, just a very small rectangle. I'm going to make sure that it's filled with the terrazzo pattern that I want to use in my document and that's this one here. Provided it's filled with that pattern. What I can do is copy this rectangle. Choose "Edit" "Copy", switch over to my new document and choose "Edit" "Paste". As soon as I paste it in, I'm going to press "Delete". What that does is because I pasted something that had a pattern applied to it. That pattern now appears in the swatches palette so I can use it. That was all that I was doing with that particular rectangle. What I want to do is to grab some pieces in this illustration and fill them with my terrazzo pattern. But the last time I did that crop, everything went back into a group. I'll need to break it out again with "Object Ungroup". That simply makes it easier to select things so I'll grab some of these objects and fill them with this terrazzo pattern and making sure that I'm using the fill of course and not the stroke. So I'm going to grab a few pieces in this design and just replace them with a pattern fill. Because odd numbers typically work better, I'm going to do that an odd number of times. So I've got quite a lot of elements here. I'm going to go for seven. So seven of these elements have now been replaced with a pattern fill. But I think that we could do better even still. So I'm going to grab this shape and this one and this one. I'm doing that by just holding the Shift key as I'm clicking on each of them in turn, I'll choose "Object" "Transform" "Scale". What I want to do is not transform the objects, but I do want to transform the patterns. But I want to bring them down a little bit smaller than they are. So I'm going to go for 50 percent. So this pattern is now much tighter, much smaller than it was before. So I'll click, "Okay." Then I might take a couple of these other pieces and make it much larger "Object" "Transform" "Scale". Again, disable "Transform Objects" and increase the scale. This time I'll go to about a 150 percent and click, ''Okay.'' To finish off my notebook cover, I would go ahead and create a rectangle for a title. So I'm just dragging out a rectangle here. I want it to be filled with a solid color, so I'll just go to the white. Now I want to also use one of the colors from this pattern, but I don't have it all ready saved as a swatch, so I'll select an object that is created, filled with it and click "New swatch" and "Okay", because that makes it as a swatch that I can use in just a minute. Well, I'm going to use it straight away on this rectangle. So I'm going to grab my white filled rectangle, go to the "Appearance panel" because I want to stroke it with this new color. I'll just increase the stroke weight as well. But I want the stroke to be inside the rectangle, not on the edge. So with the stroke selected, I'll choose "Effect" and then "Path" and an "Offset path". If I turn preview on, you'll see that the offset right now is outside the shape. Well, I want it to be inside, so I'm going to add a minus value here. Minus ten is probably just a little bit too small. So I'm going to go from minus nine. Then I want the word note. So I'll go to the "Type Tool," I'm going to increase my font size because at the moment it's only 12. So let's take it up quite large. I'll type my text, move it down into position. Now, I want my type to be filled with a color that I just created or just saved. So let's go and apply that color to it and I'd like a nicer font. So if I move everything over to the right, just holding the space bar as I move it with my type selected, I can start running down the fonts here and just seeing if I can find something that I like. Now, I actually like this fifth grade cursive, so I'm going to use that. But if I were still looking, I would just be pressing the down arrow key until I got a typeface that I like and when you get a typeface that you like, what you need to do then is to just click on it because if you don't click on it, you could lose it. So that would just be applied in to the type. In actual fact, this is pretty good, so I'm going to use that. So there's an idea for using your terrazzo patterns to create a notebook cover. In this case, we've used the pattern elements to create the background objects. Then we filled some of those objects with the pattern scaled at different sizes to get this effect.
10. Pt 9 Take the Pattern to Photoshop: One of the things that you may want to do with these patterns is you may want to use them inside Photoshop. So I'm going to show you how to do that now. I've opened up one of the Terrazzo patterns. I'm just going to move everything out of the way here, so I've got some clear space to work in. I'm going to the swatches panel and I'm going to grab one of these patterns, I'm going to grab this one and just drag it into this area. Now this is the actual pattern swatch, so it's big. I'm just going to zoom out a bit so we can see it. If we go to the last pallet, the pattern swatch is in this group here. When we open it up, and if we scroll to the very end of this pattern swatch, we're going to have a no fill, no stroke rectangle at the very end. It's just the role of patterns. There's always a no fill, no stroke rectangle at the very bottom of every pattern. What it does is it marks out the area that is the pattern. So you can see that the area of the pattern is just slightly inset so these little chips from the pattern that some of them are outside, but this rectangle is marking out the area that the pattern consumes. If we want to take it to Photoshop, it would help us if we clean this up. So what I'm going to do is take this path, which is that no fill, no stroke rectangle. I'm just going to move it up to the very top of the group, so it's on top of everything but within the group. I'm going to re-select the group. Now because this path is at the very top, we can use it as a clipping mask and when we use it as a clipping mask, what we're going to do is neaten up the pattern tile. We're going to hide all little bits around the edge. There are still going to be there, but there's going to be hidden. So I'm going to choose object and clipping mask, make. I'll get a warning because this object is really complex, the document might fail. Now you can say that everything's nice and neat and tidy and this is the seamless repeating pattern tile. So let's select it and let's choose "COPY" and let's switch across here to Photoshop. Now I just have a document open in Photoshop, there's nothing in the document. I'll choose, edit and then paste. Now because we're coming from Illustrator, we're being asked to how we want to paste this. Since I want to make this a patent in Photoshop that I can use in Photoshop, pixels is just fine. I'll click "pixels" and click "OK". Now, this is much bigger than my document but that's just fine. I'll click the check mark here and now I'll go to this image, reveal all. When I choose image reveal all, the document becomes big enough that I can see the entire pattern so the pattern is now well within the area that is bounded by this document. So the document grew in effect, it became much bigger because the image that I put into it was much bigger. That image reveal all, it's really handy when you're working in Photoshop. Now I don't want the background, so I'm just going to trash that. I'm going to control or command, click on this layer thumbnail. What I want to say is there's little marching and it's all around the edge of this pattern. Because what I want to do is get rid of the excess document because it's quite a bit there so I'll choose Image and then crop. Now I have a document that is full of my pattern tile. I could save it if I wanted to but for now, I'm just going to move this into the pattern storage location in Photoshop. So choose edit and then define pattern. I'm pulling out large terrazzzo tile, I'll click "OK". So that's now saved as a pattern in Photoshop so I can close that document down and I can create a brand new document. This time I'm going to make mine much bigger than my pattern space, 4,000 by 4,000 pixels. To fill that with my pattern, I'll choose layer, new fill layer, and then pattern. I'll click "OK" and the very last pattern that I created in Photoshop is the one that is filling this document so I can make it larger if I want to, I can scale it larger or smaller. I'm just going to make it 100 percent and if we zoom in here, we will say that this is the seamless pattern. We're seeing no obvious lines in this pattern. Now if this were not a seamless repeating pattern, we would be seeing lines in it. So that's how you can take a pattern from, for example, Illustrator and use it in Photoshop. For example, you might want to make this scrapbook paper in Photoshop, in which case, I would have used a document that's 3,600 by 3,600 pixels in size because that will be able to be saved as 12 by 12 scrapbook paper at 300 DPI. But it's very easy to take patterns from Illustrator to Photoshop. The one thing you will want to make sure that you do in Illustrator is, clip the pattern swatch so that all you're seeing is the actual pattern swatch not the bits outside it so that when you drop it into Photoshop, you've got the entire pattern swatch and nothing extra that's going to make your pattern not work.
11. Project and wrapup: We've now finished all the video content for this class, so now it's over to you. Your class project is to make one or more of these terrazzo patterns. You may also want to make them into scrapbook paper or, for example, a notebook cover or some other project using your pattern. Post an image of your completed pattern, either just the pattern or the pattern in use, as your class project. I hope that you've enjoyed this course. I hope that you've learned heaps and heaps of things about Illustrator of which you were previously unaware. Now, as you are working through this course, you probably saw a prompt which asks if you would complete a class recommendation. Please, if you did enjoy the class, would you complete that recommendation for me. It helps other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you see the follow link on the screen, click it to keep up to date with new classes as they're released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
12. Bonus Find and remove small objects: Now, whether the things that I said that I would show you before we finished, was how to get rid of small objects from a set of elements here. Well, let's swing across to the web because I'm going to take you to this website. You'll click here on select paths by size. Then here, you'll click to download the zip file. Now you're going to download it, you're going to expand it, you're going to grab the script file, and you're going to install it in exactly the same way as we've been installing scripts in this class. Let's just go back to see here, this is the dialogue that was originally in the script. It's been changed a little bit since then. I'm just going to close that down. Let's go to illustrator. Now, the first thing I'm going to do is zoom in, and work out what too small is, because we don't know what we're going to get rid of until we know how small things are. I'm going to click on this check because I'm thinking that's probably just a little bit smaller than I would like. I'm reading off here that, its width is about seven pixels, and its height is just under three pixels. Let's just zoom back out, and select out all of the shapes. I'll choose file and scripts, and then select paths by size. What I want to do is remove everything that is less than four pixels, in height. I'm going to select here on height, and I want to select things that are smaller than the slider value, which is four pixels, and I'll click okay, and watch when I do what happens over here. The script is going through all of those selected shapes, and it's working out which of those shapes are smaller than four pixels in height, and it's leaving them selected. Now, there are a lot of shapes here. It's going to take a long time to run. Particularly, if we're working on a larger document, you will want to go and make coffee at this stage, and probably seat and drink the coffee, and come back when the scripts had time to run. Because it does take a long time and it can look like it's doing absolutely nothing, and possibly has crashed your machine, but it's just chugging away in the background, making it's selection. Now, I paused the video to make sure that the script had all the computer resources that it needed. It's now finished, and it's telling me that there are 373 paths still selected. It took a minute and 50 seconds to run, I'll click okay. It's really important that you close that script dialogue, because you won't be able to do anything with your selection until you've done that. As we roll through the last palette, you can see that there are a whole heap of shapes that are selected. If we want to get rid of them, then we can just choose edit and then cut, and they are deleted. All those small elements have been removed from our pattern. The way we've done it, is to use a script that selects paths by size. I think you'll find that script it is handy, particularly if you want to clean up small elements in your tiles. Of course, it will also clean up large elements. You can get it to look for elements that are larger than a certain size, and get rid of those, should you wish to do so.
13. Bonus video Illustrator Find and close or delete open paths: This is a bonus video for the terrazzo class. The question that somebody had for me was, how do you deal with open paths? They had some open paths in their design. What I'm going to do is address that in this video. Here on the screen, I have some of the elements that are going to go together to make a terrazzo pattern. Now there are some issues with stock websites that will not allow you to upload vector files that have open paths in them. An open path is something like you would create with the pen tool where your just clicking across and that is an open path, it's not finished off. You're not allowed to have those for stock images and if you have open paths, your vector stock is going to be rejected. In addition, open paths is not a particularly good idea anyway. How do you work out if even got open paths? Well, you're going to choose "Window" and then "Document Info". If you go over here to "Objects", then you'll see whether you've got any open paths. But of course before you do that, you have to select whatever it is that you want to test. I have now only objects on my artboard selected and here you will see that there are 3,811 paths of which nine of them are open. So they are a concern to me. The problem is if I've got 3,811 paths, finding the nine open paths is going to be a bit of an issue. While we know that we actually have a problem, the question becomes how do we solve it? Well, a solution is two fall. Firstly, we have to find those paths and then we have to either close them or delete them. Deleting them as very easy, closing them is a little bit more difficult. But the problem of finding the path is this. There is no feature in Illustrator that finds open paths. What we're going to do is head to the web. Now this website, you'll see the link to it on the screen. This is a site for a number of plugins, most of which happened to be for fee, but there is a free one and it happens to be the one we want. When you get here, press "Control" or "Command F" and just type in select. Because what you're looking for is this select menu and that will take you automatically to it. Now this is a free plugin and it adds things to the select menu. One of the things that it adds to the select menu is open path. We can then select open paths of the select menu. You're going to come to here and just click to download which one you want. In my case, I'm using Illustrator CC 2019 on a Windows machine, so I'll select that. You'll see that there are options for 32-bit, although most people's computers are going to be 64-bit these days. If you're running these applications and you're running them on a fairly new computer, you can pretty much assume you're working on a 64-bit machine. For the Mac, there is only one choice of options. You're going to download that file. Let's swing across to see what it looks like. It's going to come down as a zip file. On a Mac, you'll just double-click it and that will just open it and extracted on a PC, you will need to double-click it to open it and then you want to extract all files. Now, I've already done that. What you end up with is a read me and an AIP file. The AIP file is the plugin. Now this is a plugin not a script, so it's critical that you put it in the right place. You're going to right-click and just choose "Copy", so you've got it on the clipboard. On a Windows machine, you're going to your computer, so you need to get to your "C" drive and then you need to get to "Program Files". Go to "Adobe" and then locate your version of Illustrator. In my case, it's CC 2019, here it is. I'm going to double-click on it. You'll see that there's a plug-ins folder, and we will put it here in the plug-ins folder. I've already done that. Because you do need to restart your computer to install those plugins. Now while you are here, if you want to be able to close paths, I'll also give you a link for the closed path zip file. This is it here, I've already extracted the contents. There's a close all paths script and there is a close selected path script. Again, you're going to grab both of these, so I'm going to copy them and again, this need to go in a certain location. We're going to computer, again, "C" drive, "Program Files", "Adobe", locate your version of Illustrator mine CC 2019. Go to "Presets". Go to your language which in my case is English US, but you'll have a language appropriate to what language you're using. Then you'll go to "Scripts" and you're going to put it in here and so I've already installed close all paths and closed selective paths, and then you'll restart Illustrator. Now on the Mac, this is the location that you're going to put the files in. It's a little easier on the Mac because you're going to find your Illustrator folders in the applications area. Once you've installed those in the correct location and restarted Illustrator, let's go and see how we're going to use these features. When you restart Illustrator, you'll see a little message on the screen saying that the plugin has been successfully installed. I will go to "Select" and we'll go to "Object" and you'll find that there are now a whole heap of additional things on the select object menu, including open paths. We'll click here on "Open Paths" and Illustrator has now selected the open path. I'm going to press "F7" to get my layers palette. You'll see that there's open paths are spread throughout this document. There in all places. It would be very difficult to find them otherwise. But now that they're selected, we can do something with them. Well, the obvious thing is that since there are so few of them and they're not really contributing much here. I could just press the "Delete" key and that would delete them. Let's do that. I'm just going to press the "Delete" key and they will be deleted. But let's undo that in case what you want to do is to close the path. They're now back in the document, let's see what we will do. We will choose "File" and then "Scripts", and because we've got the path selected that we want to close, we will just choose "Close Selected Paths". Those paths will now be closed so that they are no longer open paths. Which means that when we go to "Select" and then "Object" and "Open Paths", we're not going to get any selection because there are no open paths. We can also go back to the document info and just confirm this with "Window" and then "Document Information". Here we have now 3,811 closed paths. None of them are open. I hope that this has helped you understand how you can determine, whether you have any open paths and then solve it by either selecting and deleting them or selecting and closing them. Just a heads up, the reason why we're doing this in part is that high-end websites that the selling stock will not let you have open paths in your document. I hope that this has helped you to the person who asked the question. Rosa, thank you very much, I hope that this has solved your problem. If you do encounter any difficulties, please contact me through the community panel.
14. Script Download Instructions: Hi there. This is an additional video for this class because there's been some problems with downloading the scripts so I'm going to show you what to do. You're going to come to the project description page and click on Random Select. We'll go and have a look at the page that opens. With random select here to be able to download this script, you'll need to come all the way down to the bottom of the page. Click here to download the script. It's going to download as zip file. I'm not going to do that. That's just functioning perfectly here. Let's go and have a look at this one. This is random swatches fill again, you're going to click on it to open that link. This is the download link for this particular script. You'll click here to download it. You can see here 167 random swatches fill. It's a zip file. Again, you're just going to click Save to save it and you'll unzip it. Let's go and have a look at the last one. This is select by size. I'll click on it. It opens up this page here, here you're going to click this link. It says select paths by size. Click on it once. It opens up this page here. This is where the scripts are there in a single zip file here, so you're going to click here and download this zip file. Again, you can see here it's coming down as a zip file. Again, you would unzip it and inside that zip file are all the scripts that you need. Now if your browser is not working for this, change, browser or use a different browser because these scripts are functioning and they are downloadable. This video is made on the 10th of September 2020. Just so that you know that it's up-to-date at that date.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
