Textured Dot Pattern in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Textured Dot Pattern - Introduction - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ class: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Create a Textured Dot Pattern in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs, and working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today, we're looking at creating a dot pattern that has a texture in it. Along the way, you'll learn some techniques for creating a grid of shapes, for layering effects to act as a sort or mask, and a whole lot more. As you're watching these videos, you'll see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up and secondly, write in just a few words why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, please do so. I read and respond to all your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. So if you're ready now, let's get started. Creating a texture dot pattern in Illustrator. 2. Pt 1 - Create the Dot Pattern: For this texture.pattern, I'm going to create a new document choosing file new. It's going to be 350 pixels by 350 pixels in size RGB color mode and I'll click "Okay." I'm very reluctant to specify exact sizes for documents unless it is really important and in this case, it's really important, and I'm about to explain why. We're going to create a circle and it's going to be 60 pixels by 60 pixels, so I'll do that and select "Okay." I'm going to make it a fill circle with no stroke, and I want to move it up so that it's five pixels in from the top and left of this document of this art board. With it selected, I'm going to these transform tools here, they're also accessible here from the transform panel. You'll select the topmost of these nine little boxes, the one at the top left, and then you'll set the x and y to five pixels each. That just positions the circle where I need it to be. Now, the mathematics of this is that the circle is 60 pixels wide and I want a gap of 10 pixels between it and the next circle, and I want five across the document. I'm going to add the diameter of this circle which is 60 to the gap between the two circles which is 10, and that gives me 70. I want five circles so I'll multiply 70 by five which is how I get 350. Let's create our circles now. With this circle selected, I'll choose effect, distort and transform and then transform. I'll click "Preview on," and I want four copies with the original that would make five, and I want to move the copies 70 pixels in a horizontal direction. I'll click "Okay." Now I want to do exactly the same thing but this time in a vertical direction so I'll choose effect, distort and transform, transform. I'll click to apply a new effect, I'll make four copies, I'll turn preview on, and this time I'll set the vertical move value to 70 pixels and click "Okay." Now, these circles at the moment don't actually exist in illustrated, they're just a transformation of this original circle. I want them to each have an independent existence so I'll click object expand appearance. Then I'll click object ungroup and continue to do it until ungroup is no longer an option. That just bursts all of these circles out so when I open my last panel up, I'm going to have a layer that has 25 circles in it, no groups, nothing magical here. The next step is to create a rectangle the exact size of the art board, so I'll click the rectangle tool, click in the art board, type 350 by 350 pixels and click "Okay." I'm going to align this to the art board, so I'll click on it, I'll open up the align panel, click show options and just make sure it's set to align to art board, and then I'll click to center the shape on the art board. I have a layer with a rectangle of size of the art board and 25 circles. I'm going to make a duplicate of this layer so I'm going to drag and drop it on the new layer icon. I'm going to turn off visibility and lock down the bottom most layer and then just open the top one which is identical to the bottom of course. What I'm going to do here is select everything on this layer; the rectangle size of the art board and the 25 circles, and I'm going to the path finder palette. You can get to that by choosing window and then pathfinder. What I'm looking for is this option here, it's called exclude, and what it's going to do is cut out the circles from the square. Now I have a square with a whole heap of circles cut out, and I can color it so I can go to the swatches panel and choose a color for it. Now, I grabbed some swatches earlier that I'm just going to go and get here. Right now I have my rectangle with the holes in it selected and I can just click here to apply one of these colors to that shape. I'm going to turn its visibility off and I'm going to lock it down so it's there but I can't actually see it, and I'm going to do the reverse to layer 1. In layer 1, I'm going to isolate this rectangle that is at the top of the layer and I'm going to drag it to the very bottom of the layer, and when it arrives there, I'm going to set it to a no fill no stroke rectangle. If you're familiar with creating patterns by hand in Illustrator, you'll recognize this as the boundary of a pattern. It's not going to be important for the first iteration of this pattern but it will be important for the second, so I'm going to create it now that I'm here. Next, I'm going to select diagonal rows of the circle. So I'm going to click in this one first and then I'm going to shift click to select all the ones in this diagonal. I'm going to make sure their fill is at the full and I'm going to apply a fill to them. Then I'm going to take the ones just above these, this one here, here, and here. I've got four circles selected so I need a fifth and the fifth one is this one down in the bottom corner. So I'll select it and then I'll apply a color to those, then I'll go to the next set. Three in this diagonal and these two here are the others that belong to that series. I'll color those, select these two and then these three. Finally, I'll select the remaining black circles and I'll color them. I'm going back to the layer at the top, I'll unlock it and I'll just open it up and make the square that has the holes punched out of it all visible. We can now make this into a pattern so I'm going to click on the top layer and shift click on the second layer so I have everything selected. With the selection tool, I'm just going to drag and drop it into the swatches panel. I'm going to come over here and create a second art board. For convenience, I'm going to make it 350 pixels by 350 pixels, but it could be any size that you like. I'm going to make a square that is the exact same size as this art board and I'm going to center it on the art board. With its fill selected, I'm going to click on my new pattern swatch and then I'll resize it by choosing object transform scale. I'm going to transform the pattern only, not the object and I'll do it down to 50 percent and click "Okay." This is the first iteration of our pattern of dots. In the next video, we're going to apply a texture to it. 3. Pt 2 - Apply a Texture to the Dots: Before I go ahead and texture this pattern, I need to clean up my layers palette just a little bit. I'm going to add two brand new layers, and I'm going to take this rectangle here up and put it on one of those new layers. I'm going to turn its visibility off and I'm going to lock it down because right now I don't need it. I have an empty layer 3 here, and I have the layer that has the square with the circles cut out of it. I'm going to move this layer up above my empty ones, so the empty one is sandwiched between the two layers that have the remainder of this patent on them. For now, I'm going to lock down and turn off the visibility of this square that has the circles cut out of it. I'm going to select just something on this artboard and press Control or Command 0 to just put this artboard right in the center of my work area. Now I'm going to layer 3 and I'm going to select it. Nothing is selected in this document so I can safely switch my fill and stroke colors. I'm going to get a better stroke color so I'm going to choose something probably like this color which is fairly light, and I'm going to use it to texturize my circles. I'm going to use a brush, so I'll click on the paintbrush tool, and I'll open up the brushes palette. You can get the brushes palette too by choosing Window and then Brushes. I'll click the fly-out menu and choose Open Brush Library. I'll select Artistic and then Artistic_Chalk Charcoal Pencil. These are a series of brushes and the topmost one of these brushes is actually pretty good for creating a texture with. With it selected I'm now going to brush my texture over the shapes in this pattern. You'll see that the default setting for this brush is pretty good for actually covering up these shapes that I've created, and just texturing them. Now you can be as detailed or not with your textures as you like. But don't worry about any additional texture that might be falling outside the artboard, because that's going to be cut off when we create our pattern and it's all going to be automatic. If you're finding that your computer bugs down a little bit, then you can close any programs that you don't need to have open. If it's really causing you problems you may want to restart your computer before you attempt this texturing, particularly on a Windows machine that can be handy because it just refreshes your memory. It cleans everything out, and means that you've got plenty of memory to operate with. I'm now running over each of these shapes a couple of times just to texture them nicely. When I'm finished and happy with my texturing, I'm going to turn back on visibility of the layer that has the square with the circles cut out of it. This is what my texture is going to look like. At this stage you can come back in and recolor the square if you want to. I'm just going to bring the fill to the full, and just have a look at perhaps a slightly different color for it. I think I'm going to color it that way. I'm going back to my layers palette and I'm going to select on these layers. I'm going to select all three layers, that have content in this pattern. I'm going to the select tool and I'm going to drag and drop this into the swatches panel. I'm going to come back to this second artboard, make the square visible and unlock it. I'm going to target this square, and then when I press Control or Command 0, the artboard will be placed right in the middle of my work area. With the rectangle selected I can now click on my pattern and it will be applied to that square. There is the texture.pattern created in Illustrator. 4. Project and Wrap up: Your project for this class will be to create your own texture dot pattern in Illustrator and to post an image of your pattern in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned something about working in Illustrator that you didn't know before you took this class. As you're watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up and secondly, write in just a few words why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations will help other students to see that this is perhaps the class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, please do so. I read and I 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.