Think Outside of the Grid! A guide to building patterns that are anything but square.

1. Class Intro & Your Class Project: Hello everyone and welcome back to this Skillshare class, I'm Kristina Hultkrantz. I'm an Illustrator and Surface Pattern Designer based in Mariefred in Sweden. In this class, I'm going to be sharing my process for taking motifs and turning them into intricate, interesting, unique patterns. I'll be covering the basics of pattern design using Illustrator's amazing pattern maker tool, which I prefer to use. I think it is way that causes way less mathematical headaches, less frustration, and it increases effectivity, save you time, plus, I think that you are able to create patterns way more intricate and difficult to find the repeat in and probably just better, if I am allowed to say that. I will be going through basics of Illustrator but not everything that Illustrator can do obviously, but what you will need to create a pattern. I will also be onto your creativity patterns. [inaudible] then I'm going to go over [inaudible] to continue to push yourself out of your color comfort zone and do something that's different, though we might not come up with just off the top of our head. In the following videos, I'll be showing you my process of creating a collection of three patterns. One pattern with one motif, one pattern with 3-5 motifs, and then a pattern with multiple motifs. I will be sharing as many tips and tricks as possibly I can so that you'll be ready to create patterns of your own. They're insanely very interesting and they're beautiful. I personally never create a pattern on a standard grid, repeat square and I welcome you to try something new as well. Half drop, pairing, and all that kind of stuff. Try to make things as complex as I can while still being simple, stuff like that, but I'll be going through all that kind of things, all my thought processes when I create patterns in the following videos. For your class project, you'll be making a mini collection of three patterns as well, one with one motif, one with 3-5, and one with multiple motifs. I already can't wait to see what you're going to come up with. Let's get started. 2. Supplies & Pep Talk: For this class, I'm going to be using motifs that I have drawn on my iPad Pro but you can of course, use any technique that you prefer to make motifs. I won't be starting from the beginning of how to draw motifs and how to digitize them. I think there's many, beautiful courses on Skillshare about this process. Please watch those beforehand. If you do have some artwork that's already ready to go, then we can start to make patterns with those. I have picked out a few different motifs and I'm going to be showing you my thought process when I create patterns with them. You can do this as well. You can either have a theme to your entire collection, which would be really fun, or you can just use this as a practice and make three different patterns that are completely different. It is totally up to you. The only supplies that you will be needing for this course is a computer with Adobe Illustrator. Then you'll have your ready-made digital illustrations that you've either drawn forehand and then vectorized and colored in Illustrator or if you had an iPad Pro like I do, I have used Adobe Draw to draw my motifs and then I will bring them into the computer to continue. There's one thing that I'd like to mention before we start and that is there is no one way to create a pattern and there's no one right way to be a pattern designer. There's no right or wrong when it comes to making patterns. You can do pretty much whatever you like, as long as the final repeats properly and there's no mistakes like that. There's no proper way to use Illustrator. You figure out the ways that you like using the program and your workflow and all that stuff. Taking tidbits from tips and tricks from me, what I do with my process, and then be inspired by another artist, and then be inspired by working and figuring Illustrator for yourself, and then all of a sudden, you'll find your style in your workflow what works for you. I think that's very important. It's something that you don't need to stress about. Just figure it out as you go and it will work out in the end. I am certain. Definitely as for me, I've been fiddling around with Illustrator for years and I feel like I learn new tips and tricks all the time that could've saved me so much time in the beginning if I had known but I didn't. I still made beautiful work then and I think I still do now. I just maybe have figured out some ways for saving myself some time and fewer headaches. That's always good. I look forward to showing you my process. In the next video, we're going to jump into Adobe Illustrator and start learning stuff. 3. Basics & Intro to the Pattern Make Tool: Here we are in Adobe Illustrator. I have already uploaded the artwork that I plan on creating patterns with. This is for my multi pattern with tons of motifs. I thought today I would use these motifs for my 3-5 pattern and I thought I would choose one of these fruits to do a pattern for my one motif patterns. If you are new around these parts, I want to show you around a little bit before I start getting into pattern-making and I'll start out by opening a new document, so do "New" and the artwork size is completely not interesting to me, I'm not going to be using that really that's full in size, but it's good to have a sniked this, if you're going to be printing this later and it's always nice to have a high PPI or DPI, so 300 is fine there, this is all good and because I'm very unorganized I never name anything properly. Here we go, here we have little nice grid and what's funny is there's a grid around it and my course is called, "Thinking Outside of the Grid" and the first thing you do is bring up a square but that's just being ironic. That's okay. I thought I would bring in one of these motifs to create a pattern with. When you're creating a pattern that only has one motif, I think that has to be pretty interesting item. I would either pick the pineapple because it's quite a lot going on or I like this dragging fruit, this cute and has also some details and then the banana of course, it's really funny. That maybe we'll start with the banana and I don't think I grouped these yet, so I'm just going to use the "Lasso" tool that you find over here. Get it and then press V on my keyboard, which is the select tool and I'm going to pull it over to my new documents that we are only concentrating on this awesome banana. Now, that I selected it, there's a few things that I want to do to this banana before we start making it into a pattern. Like I said, I'll go over some basics of Illustrator, things that are good to know before you start creating patterns. I created this in Adobe Draw on my iPad and all of these tiny little blue thingies are dots or angle points and the more you have, the heavier your file is, and the saddle your computer is going to be. If we reduce this a little bit, we can make things easier for ourselves. So go to "Object", "Path", "Simplify" and you can usually reduce by one or two percent without causing a lot of craziness to your illustration. I can just show you what happens if we do 50 becomes quite a different thing. It becomes a very stylized, as you can see, it reduces the angle points by so many that the lines don't match up anymore. This of course, could be really cool look if you wanted to go for that, but that's not how I wanted it. So I usually go to 98 and we can preview and from what I can see, there's not much that has changed, but it has reduced it by a ton. That's good. Let's look at that. I also want to group this also. Let's just unclick it and I think it looks fine, doesn't look funny, so much different. But right now, everything is separate. So if you click anywhere and move the entire banana is annoying and you'd have to get the "Lasso" tool again and select the whole thing and that's not going to be very time effective. So we undo that and I will select the whole thing and then you say Command-G and you group it. Now it's one whole of group and I can move it around as much as I want to. Now that is grouped and simplified, I also want to show you some ways of manipulating this for later when you are going to create a pattern. To create a duplicate, you press "Alt" at the same time as you drag your banana over, and now you have two bananas. While there's one banana selected, you can press O on your keyboard and this will make it a mirror image. If you press down "Shift" while you're doing this, it will make it mirror and then at the same angle. If you press in-between these commands, press "V so that you go back to the "Select" tool and then re-select your banana, you press the R on your keyboard, you can rotate. If you need to make small adjustments to what angle your new banana is, do something like that. I think that's a good start. I'm not sure if there's anything else you need to know. If you see little mistakes that are driving you nuts, like maybe this stipple little thing right here what's going on over there, we can go over into that and see what's happening. You can use this the white "Direct Selection Tool" to change things. Can go in really close and you can seriously just move anything that bothers you until it looks better. There's also handles and stuff. This is if, oops see I mess up all the time. I'm not sure if I'm actually going to fix anything here, just moves the handles, can move it in, make it a little bit more flash here and this we straighten a little bit, that a little less crazy there in the corner. But I like when illustrations have little mistakes, a hand-drawn qualities. Stuff like that doesn't bother me, I actually like it a little bit more. I would usually not change stuff like that but you can, feel free. I think that's pretty much all that I would like to know. We can go through some more things like if we wanted to change this yellow color. See now I've already grouped it all, so how do I change the color? Repeat, double-click, and you come into this crazy new mode, which I forgot what it's called, oh "Isolation mode", it's called. We're only going to be doing things to this one banana and then you see this one's faded because you can't do anything to it. Now you can select things that are within this group. Here, I clicked onto the yellow piece and I can go in and make it difference yellow if I wanted to try something brighter and lighter. See? So that's how that works. I think that's just the basics of small things that you can do to change things that you've already drawn. There's obviously a million other things that you can do and change, but I think we can go over that in another course about drawing your actual motifs and making them digital. We're just going to focus on pattern-making. Let's jump into that right away. To get out of this isolation mode just double-click somewhere on the screen. We have our two bananas and I want to just start with one because this was a pattern-making course or this is the section where I'm supposed to be making just one pattern or a pattern Oh my God English is hard. A pattern with just one motif. So I'm going into "Object" "Pattern" "Make". I selected my one banana and let's do this. Here we come into the "Pattern" make interface, we can call it and this is straight-up grid. That is the regular standard way to make a repeat, and this is what I'm trying to inch. Well like intrigued, maybe step out of because this is very striking, it's a very simple pattern, it's very graphic, it's cool but we can do more. I'm going to show you what you can do in this "Pattern" make tool. I also want to move this away from that, oops, no, it's not grouped. How did that happen? I'll make sure it's grouped again. We group now. Okay, yes. I'll move it away from the white part for it because I find that cyclically distracting and we don't need that. Here we are. Let's go over the pattern make tool quickly. Here you can name your pattern if you like to. I never do and then here there's different tile type. You can have that standard grid like we have, we have brick by rows. Then you can see the tiles like as bricks. Then we have a standard cup broke by column or it's also known as a half grew up repeat and then we have Hex by column, or Hex by rip. I would say it is a very similar to the brick, but somehow becomes a little bit more dynamic. I can't really say why. But its rounder, more mirrored, not sure how to describe this. In the brick by row and column you also have offset settings where you can choose to do it like a half. Where you can do force or to fit? You know, you can choose here a little bit more wiggle room here. You don't have to do any mass whatsoever, which is really neat, and then we also have housework, I guess some of my neighbors something. Here, this is where you choose the size of your swatch and for the moment, it is a really crazy size, which is unnecessary. So I always make sure to have a even number that will help you later when you're trying to finish it. So you don't have any small lines or anything like that. Make sure that it's even numbers. Here you can choose how it overlaps if you're going to be overlapping the motif. Like from the left-hand in front or the right in front and the top in front and then the bottom in front. It's just things that you can fiddle with and then we also have copies and this is how many times it will show you the pattern repeated. Now it's three-by-three, or you can choose to do nine by nine. The whole screen is full of bananas. Then again, because sometimes it gets confusing to see which one is the one you can work on and which one are the pattern repeats so you can dim it down to 30. So then you see that this is the method you can move around to test different things with. Let's zoom out a little bit. We can stop here and be like, "Oh, this is our pattern right here." But I think that's not so fun. Also, I would like to show you that you can change the size of your swatch, very easily by hand. So you can easily just test how it looks if we wanted a lot of space in between our bananas or if we wanted to really close, they stick together. You could even try that. What does that look like? Becomes all of a sudden something else. It doesn't really look like a banana. These are things that I think are so much easier because you see it repeating in real time browser. Then you are making your swatch by hand and then trying to figure out what's going look like and constantly testing it here you have a feel for what's happening as you're creating and that's the best thing I think about this tour. Okay, so I think I'm going to start by making my little pattern a little bit bigger like this and again, once I'm done fiddling with the size manual, I'll unclick it here, and then I'll go over here and make sure that it is a whole number. I think it's always fun even if you have one item. I think it's interesting to duplicate it. Like I showed you previously by clicking "Alt" and then maybe mirroring it. maybe like so. That we bring in a little bit more movement to the pattern. So even though it's one thing that you've drawn it all of sudden becomes several and then you could even do one more and then use the rotate to make this one also looks slightly different. Here we go, so here we quickly made a pattern with one motif, but it is dynamic and interesting and this is a brick by row. So it repeats horizontally. We can make it a 100 percent so we can see how it looks. I think this is really fun in Q. What's also cool is that you can just tweak small things by moving slightly and you can see how it affects the entire pattern while you're creating it, rather than going to constantly have to test your swatch and holler. I really like this process and the possibilities are like this thing. Here's a first quick pattern with one banana and I'm pretty pleased with this so far. I will show you another way. We can save this as a copy. We'll save this and copy and when you save it, it comes up over here in the swatches panel. Let's try out another. Go to higgs by row and then we'll adjust the swatch size a little bit and then we'll move in there bananas around, see what it looks like if we stack them a little what does that look like the crazy? I'm going to dim these because they can't see which ones are the ones that I can move. That one in that line. This became like a lattice of some sort. It's neat. I wouldn't have thought of that. You can build that from there. I can continue to duplicate and we're going to do this one upside down then around until I find something interesting. This is good nets. Yeah, you see that, this is another look and there's so many ways that you can just play around crazy banana patterns. I think I'm going to close these out and I'll show you what to do with them once you're finished. Just press "Done". Okay. Once you have jumped out of the pattern make tool, then we have our swatches ready over here, and another thing I wanted to mention, I don't have a background color when I created the swatch I like to add that later. Here I'll just take a box and make a nice square here or rectangle, and I will fill it with burnout, I think I'll just do white. Then I'm going to make a copy of this to fill with a pattern. I'm going to do Command "C" Command "F" and that makes it copy of the exact same rectangle on top of the bottom rectangle and then I'm going to go over here, to press "V" just to have a selection tool again and go up to my swatches panel and I'm going to click the pattern that I created and I'll do the first one that I like that one better. The brick by row pattern a little bit more orderly. That's your pattern finished. This way you can easily test out different background colors and fix that crazy yellow background. There's our first pattern. You see this faint two lines, they're usually a thing that illustrator does, it just renders diffuse, zoom-in usually goes away, so they don't actually exist, but something that illustrator does, and it's very irritating and I wish that they could remove this in coming version. But for now we have to deal with this and sometimes they stay forever. It's hard to tell, sometimes it's there, they're for real or if they're not. But they seem to go away when I zoomed in, so I am confident that they aren't really there. Okay, so that's how our first pattern is created with one motif. In the next video, I'll show you how and what I think about when I'm creating a pattern with about three to five with tips, so let's get started on that. 4. Create a Pattern with 3-5 Motifs: Now we're going to move on to creating a pattern with three to five motifs. Let's start off with making sure that these motifs are ready for pattern-making. I'm going to simplify them and group them again so I'll do that quickly. I need to to just block some things, the background items. Here we go, let select everything and I will object paths to simplify to 98, reduce it a lot which is nice. Then I'm going to use the lasso tool to go around and each house and item to select it and then group it. The quick shortcut for the lasso tool is Q. And if you want to move quickly to the direct select tool which is usually V but then you'd have to toggle between V and Q all the time. But if you press command, you can go quickly to the direct select and then release. Does that makes sense? So you have your cursor on Q for the lasso tool. You press command to turn it into then and then you can move if you needed to move around stuff without having to toggle between pressing lasso tool and direct select tool. That's what doing here. I really hope you can't hear the same banging and work they're doing on my house or somewhere in my neighborhood. [inaudible] Command to move them because it is close. Here we go. Group. All right, so they're all ready to go. I'm going to choose three to start off with just to show you what you can do with just three. I think maybe I'll pick this one, the blue one. Maybe skin cream, do they look cute together. [inaudible] It not so important. It's important and, I'll choose these three. I'm going to move these over to my new pattern-making board that I've created for this course. Here you have my motifs here and again I will select them and I will open up the pattern make tool. Again, we can choose which one we would like to work with. I'm not sure which one I like to go with, but let's do hex by column just to pick something. Then we can start figuring out a pattern with this. I'm going to make my work space a little bit bigger so we have something to work with. See I can just like randomly move it around it and just think of how I would like it beforehand. I just make sure that this is an even number. Then this I can adjust as they want as I'm making the pattern. I'm just going to move them around zoom out so I can see how the pattern is building. I will add a few more copies just so that a better sense of what's happening. This begin when I saw diagonal pattern. As you can see here, this overlaps on top, which looks a little bit weird, so we can change that so may be it is. Press the bottom in front so that way the house it's underneath covers, which I think makes more sense. You almost get depth of field this way. But over here it's overlapping like that around, wait a second. It makes sure that the right was in front as well. Then now we see that is making sense everywhere. Here's one simple pattern. Because there's so few items I feel like it repeats very often. Like you see this house so many times. I'm not really a big fan of that. That's where I usually, when I create patterns, I usually have way more items than just three things. Because I think it's more interesting, there's more things to look at. Your eye doesn't get stuck. Like I just think about these blue houses are constantly everywhere. Here, right here, right here, right here, right here, so that's why I usually have patterns with a lot of items in them. One thing that I do to break that sometimes is that I will duplicate the item that is sticking out. So then we have two, and all of a sudden like confuse yourself, like which ones repeating where or something like that. See now it's too clear because I added an items, we have to make sure that we increase our area a little bit so we can move around a little bit more. Same thing, just make sure that you're making it even. Get me weirdness. You see if you have something that you like to move, you can right-click arranged, sent you back, or wherever you're trying to do. [inaudible] placed it so it's behind this house or that house before I do that. Here's how to move things around until it starts working for you. That's the problem with trying to teach this process because it's intuitive. I think you figure it out by yourself, what looks good and what do you like the best. Time for me to say what is an excellent pattern because there's so many different kinds of patterns and there's so many pattern that are amazing. This one has gone into a horizontal or a diagonal, straight look which is interesting and you could continue with that look, you make them even closer together. We can really like smush together. It's like a little community of houses they're all smushed together it's fun. There's also this became halls and her polka dot but we can smush it together even worse it becomes more together we'll see what happens. Now, I have half of the print on one side and half for the other on the other side so I think I should move the two parts together while I do this that make more sense. Click it and then right-click, send it back. I liked the way it was before. Something like this. Then we're going to go back to manipulating this swatch size. That's crazy, see. I want to make it a little bit taller. Then now I want to make it a little bit less wide so that they come together like the smushed together city, and that's neat. I like that look, so I'll stop there. Make sure that this is an even number. Sometimes I even like to make sure that it's like an even number because it just seems right. Here we go and we'll say that this one is done. We'll press "Done". Then we'll do the same thing as we did with our bananas. We'll just zoom out a little bit and create another box for this pattern, I'll change this background color right away to white. But let's do like a creamy white. There we go, and then copy, "Command C", and then "Command F" to make a copy on the front. Then we'll press "V" to select and then go over here to our new pattern and that is our little pattern that we created. I'm going to zoom in to just check out. Also I'd like to mention that if you see something when you are finished with your pattern, you can go back into your pattern and fix it. If there's something you don't like. It's not set in stone what you created, you can just double-click on your pattern in the swatches and you're back to the pattern making area. You can't continue to fiddle around with moving things as much as you want. Just click "Done" once you're finished and it will actually change it here as well. So you don't have to retest it, it will already test it for you. That's our motif with three items. I don't know, this isn't my favorite that I've ever done, but it's neat and a little bit different from what I usually do. I like that it is something that I didn't really have in mind in my head from the beginning, so that's always the good thing I think. Why don't we do one pattern with five motifs just for fun? I'll go back to my little houses. I have those three. I'll just bring in maybe, this one, and this blue one, maybe the big blue one. Then we can add these as extras, I'm not going to count these as the five. We go, let me bring those into here as well. Then let's select all of these and go into the object pattern, make two again. I think I'd like it to look like a little city. I'd like there to be rows of this. I think that the think that the brick by row would look nice, so it looks like it's staggered, and they almost like this airy look that we have going on. It just happened to be like this. It looks like as, if you're looking from maybe or looking at a coastline from a water area. Let's just again make this even numbers, we go, and then I will move them around. This one is kind of leaning, I feel, so I'm going to use the R to make it more straight. I think that was good. Then this green one is also leaning a bit, so I'll also use the R command, press "R", and then I just did, like that and then I think, that's neat, has nice flow there is going up and down and over. That's really nice. I think also another tip is, the blue area is going to be your swatch. Make sure that all of your items are within the swatch because otherwise sometimes the illustrator will forget them. If you do have an item that's over here when you create the pattern, say, it won't be repeated, as you can see it disappeared. You need to make sure that you put it over here instead, and then it will be repeated. Another way to get around that, is if you group all of your items at the end when you're finished together, but that's completely not necessary. There's usually an area on your swatch area that you can put the item. Okay. I'm just going to continue to move these accessories, we can call them around. Here are the trees, so they come in. You see this tree was behind, so I wanted it in front, so I clicked to arrange, bring to front. Same thing with this tree. But it also could be there, bring to front. That is because of this, so we can see they overlap on the left. Now it's on the top and it's repeating like that, and that's good. Then let's duplicate some of these. Click it and press "Alt" at the same time and move it over, and move some of these umbrellas around so that they look like they're actually a part of the scene. I think I'll move the purple one over there and the blue one over here. That's pretty simple pattern. I loved the flow of it as it goes across, but I think that the width is a little bit too much such that we could adjust that a little bit so that a little bit closer. Here we go. I think that's a little better and we have almost like little ovals that the pattern is turned into. I think that's very nice. Again, since I just did, I'll just make sure make that it's even pixel numbers. Here we go, and I will press "Done". To make it easier I'll just copy this whole thing over. I'll click this, the one on top, the pattern and go to my swatches and click, select a new pattern. Here it is quite large pattern. If you want to adjust the scale within your square, you can select it, and then go to transform scale. I'll click "Transform Objects", and then come up with something maybe at least to 70 percent. You can press "Preview" and there it became much smaller. So you can get a better idea of the size and stuff like that. Or you can make it larger, so press "OK", and that's our motif for this section with 3-5. 5. Create a Pattern with Multiple Motifs: Now we're moving on to our third and final pattern with multiple motifs. This is the pattern that I usually do because I can't do simple as it seems, and I like to have lots of different items to move around, and I like to have a lot of leeway, and play, and stuff like that I'm going to, to save time, I have already grouped and simplified all of these little items so that it's easy. I'm just going to bring them over again to my new word. There we go, I'm going to remove this one already because as you can see that it sticks out too much, it's too different and overpowering from all of the items, so I'm just going to remove that each towel, and I think that the rest will work. I will copy them, or select the menu, and then again bring them into the pattern, make two. When I make the pattern like this, that's a lot of small little items and I'm just going to toss around my workspace. I think the best setup is the hex and by column or row, I don't really know which one would be best this time. My favorite look is the half drop, so I think I'll go by column. I moved it away from the artboard again because they find it distracting, and now I am going to give myself a little bit more space to work, and duplicate, and stuff like that. When I create a pattern with tons of little items, I make sure to give myself quite a lot of room, because I like to duplicate and reflect several of the items so it doesn't repeat so often or obvious, maybe is a better word. Other larger items I will duplicate and reflect so that we have two of them, and I'll show you what I mean. Let's zoom in a little bit, like the hammock, the palm tree, and the surfboard, I think stick out the most. Those are the items that I want to confuse my eye a little bit, I'm just going to start moving them around, and then I'm going to make a duplicate of this one, and then press O to switch it around, and press shift so that I have it's reflected on mirror it become your image. Press V and then I'm going to place it somewhere. It's start work, maybe, also to help myself now that I have so many small items, if I piled them up somewhere. Piling up in the middle, and then I can move them around later. Select all these little things and pile them up into very messy pilots, they're really confusing. I'll be fine. I always start with the largest items first. Let's move this palm tree, maybe that should be close to the hammocks, and then right away I will create a duplicate. I will mirror it again to look slightly different, and even though it's the same, and then I might event scale it so it's a little bit smaller. Then you do that, I didn't show you that truck up with this, you press S, and then scale it up or down. Now we have that, so as you can already see, it's hard to see where it's repeating because you're confused by these two things aren't the same, but they're different, and the palm trees, they all the same look completely different just because we reflected and scaled them. That's neat, then let's figure out where this surf porch will go. I wonder if it will look good there, and I wonder if I'll just keep one copy of this one or I should have two I'll see what two looks like, so I'll press alt again, and move it around. I'm not sure that it staggers like this, so I'll keep that for now. In this hammock goes, I'm going to make this scale of that around this one since they're so close to each other, so they'll look a little bit more different. I did that, and once the larger things are in place, I can start moving the smaller. Again also I am going to move this palm tree that's also quite large, then I can start putting in all of the smaller paintings, and I'm just going to fit them in wherever they fit to look good. This is a process that could take days or you could just get it right on their first try. It's up to your own personality, and how you like to work, and how efficient you are. I'm also quite a consequent person, when I do things, just like when I've done it's done, I don't think I'm not a perfectionist and that way that it needs to be perfect in every way. Usually, like letting it become what it becomes, hippie in that way, I guess. I like to trust my instinct, and I think it's usually okay. [inaudible] like those flamingo, fit that one there, and then since it's so cute, I want another flamingo, I'll just make sure to again reflect it by pressing O and shift so that it stands 90 degrees, and then maybe I will scale it again just because it look like you spent more time drawing different items when you did the same thing. Where should we put that one? Maybe over by this palm tree, so they're in the same area. I think that's where the pineapple on its head, so I'll move it somewhere, maybe over here. It's fitting perfectly there, and then mainly you just need to continue to step around until I am happy with the pattern. I think it's pretty handy to know all the little shortcuts on your keyboard, and that saves you a lot of time and frustration. I have left a document in the class documents that has little cheat sheets that you can use to study the different shortcuts, so I hope that helps you. Something [inaudible] is pretty good for now, I have some items, there's a little negative space in some areas, and there's large items that are nice and spread out so that they bounce around in nice flow. I have several items that are only one of them, which also becomes interesting like the sign and the sailboat, and stuff like that, so that they trick your eye that it's more complex than it is really and that there's more items because we duplicated a few things. Let's see what it looks like with the background color, or press down like we've done previously. I think I'll duplicate my bananas down here in this box, and I'll change the background to a nice blue color. Let's do this, the house plus I'll do then select tool, and if you press shift, then click, then you have that. Obviously, I have the wrong square select I want the back one. Again, the I tool, I dropper, which is I, and then hover over the blue and press shift at the same time. There we go, then you can just directly select the color inside of the object. Press B and select your banana plant and go to our new print. There we go, now we have a contemporary tool, we can call this one. That's neat, let's zoom in on that so we have a better look. I don't think that looks quite cute, stay near make and simple, I could of course spend way more time going over, and making less space, and making sure that there's teen in there. Everything is in its place that I think. But for right now, I think that that looks really nice, and I hope that you've gotten an idea of my process, and when I think about when I create patterns. I really like how these are the same item. They're tricking your eye into thinking like how is this being set up, and this frame always going for. I want things to look intricate, but simple at the same time. If that makes any sense or it will probably not. Here's my little collection complete. In the next video, I'm going to show you how to recolor your collections, so we can test out a different color palette, so we can jump out of our comfort zone and try different things. 6. The Recolor Artwork Tool: Okay. Now we have a little mini collection finished. By the way, I called this Curacao, by the island Curacao in the Caribbean. It's inspired by that place. I haven't been there unfortunately, but I've been there in my dreams. I've been thinking about it all winter here in Sweden whenever we've had so much ice and snow. But anyways, we're going to talk about color in this section. I'm going to remove this version of a pattern and I'm going to use these three. These are going to be my final three. I have my main pattern, I have a secondary print, and then we have my fun boat complimentary pattern. I think they'll look pretty good together though they're three very different patterns. One is very bold, one's very simple with lots of details, and then one's very detailed, but also very dynamic and show tossed. I think we have a good flow here. Let's make another color version. To do that, I am going to show you some pallets that I have created previously. I randomly flipped through magazines and I found different photos and different clothing items and things that were trendy and what popped out to me and I picked out different colors from them. I have made a swatch library from these swatches. I'm going to open that up in mine. I have saved these swatch pallets also in the class documents section if you would like to test out using them as well. I saved them here as user defined, as 2018 color palettes. I open that and you click on the folders to bring the new groups into your document. There I'll take all of them. They're all here now, so you can click out of there. Let's make some three boxes and it's going to fill with something. There we go. I want them even. You just select alt and shift at the same time, then you get a box and then Command D and you make the third one. Here we go. Let's see. I'm quite messy when I work as you can tell here. That one has that background, this one has the clean background and the last one has the crazy yellow background and then you go back to these and copy font. I too have the eyedropper and then click. There we have that one's finished. Go over to this one, we do copy font, eyedropper to select the houses. Then the last one, select this copy font, eyedropper and then bananas. Okay. Now, we're going to zoom in so we can actually see them. Because this one has the most colors, I think we'll start with that one. Let's zoom in even more so we can actually see what's happening. There we go. Let's select the whole thing, you press up here. This is the recolor artwork tool with a little color wheel, I guess it is. Then here you can see all my new color groups popped up. If you didn't have color groups like this that you've already saved, you can create new ones by creating boxes of color and then saving a folder, a new color group here in this swatches panel, and then they will come up there as well. You can also manually change colors by just double-clicking on a color and changing it like this, and that manually changes the color if you want to do that. But I'm going to test out some of my new color groups. We could press the eyedropper again to go back to how it was previously. Let's just start off by just randomly clicking one of them and I think I'll go for the first one up here. Click this one so that it changes that and you can see it's already a completely different look. Then we press this button here to randomly change the order. We're just going to keep going through. Like that already I think looks very striking and nice. I'll continue to go through some more. That looks nice too. I like the orange background. That's neat. Let's try another one. Let's try this color group. That's neat. I like that really gross, baby poop, green and that nice dusty blue. Looks really nice together. Yeah. I like that. It's very subdued and has a different feel to it than the other collection. Maybe we'll stick with this one. I like it. Pink and blue and the weird olive lime green. We'll say that we stuck with this one. You'll remember it's color group three, we are going to change the other ones, so press "Okay." We're just going to say no, we don't want to change that. All right. We go over to the next one, we'll select that. Go to the recolor artwork tool, go into group three, see they match. In here, we're going to randomize. That's cool. See already. That's cool too. We continue to look at more colors. Here we go. I just realized I wasn't recording the last piece, so I ended up going with this color scheme for the first print. That would match the number one really nicely and now I'm going to move on to do the bananas, the last one. Select the banana print and the recolor artwork tool. Then group three, and we'll start randomizing. Blue bananas is fun. That's fun too, but I want to do something a little bit weirder, so very striking. I like that one. I like all blue and it still has a little bit of the yellow for the banana-ish color, but the inside is still a little bit different. Not sure if I should go with that or if I should try something different. You see them overall, I think that could work. May be blue. I'll try a few more. No, let's stick with this. I'll be boring. No, I'm not going to be boring. I like a little dilemma there, pink, blue. I liked the idea of having the warm pink in there somehow. There that's one down. No, not white, not quite right. There we go. I think that looks nice. It matches the main print really nicely and it's different from the secondary prints, so I think I'll go with that. Press "Okay" and no. Then here we have the collection in a different color way and I think I'm really happy with that. I think that's neat and it's different from what I originally had envisioned. I think that it's always good to test. There it is. There is our final version in our new color way. That's it. We'll just zoom in just to take a little look at it again so you can see more details and stuff. Here's my main print, may be I'll call that one, going to the beach. Then here's the city. This can be Curacao, which the pattern collection is named after or inspired by. Then we have my bananas and I probably am boring you, I'll just call it bananas. But here we go. See this white line again, let's see if it's actually there. See, it disappears. There's another line that came instead. This one seems to not disappear, so let's keep going. Because I am super zoomed in it's fainter and fainter. But I don't think that it actually exits because here it doesn't exist. I'm going to say that it doesn't actually exist. Zoom out again. By the way, once you recolor the new swatches within your colors pop up over here in your swatches panel. All right. Let's move on to the last and final video where I'll share how to pull out your swatch and get it ready for maybe Spoonflower and all that stuff. 7. Saving Your Final Swatch File: We're in the final segment. This one I'm going to share how to find your school swatch and save your document to maybe use on these boom flowers, I'm going to set it like that, or if you sell the print and sent it to a company. Usually this is done and get messy. I'm going to remove these older versions. There are still over here, so don't worry, you're not deleting anything. We'll just can clean up a little bit. I like to say these are the little things that we use to create the patterns, the icons, because maybe you'd like to use those for some sort of spot printers and things like that. Make art board for those guys like this and then I'm going to go over here and pick out the three swatches for these guys. Use the banana swatch. You just pull the swatch out from the swatches panel. So that's the bananas in here is that main print with the new colors, and then here are my houses. You see they became different size swatches because we used every color or not the recolored, reuse the pattern make tool. They're all individual and different and squared. They're not grid, which is this is a little bit more interesting and dynamic in fact. To finalize these and make them usable, I will select and then create a art board behind it. Right now, I will just randomly put it out so I can zoom in and see exactly where that anchor point is. Sometimes it's more difficult to find like right now this one it's pattern has an item exactly where that anchor point is, those kind of irritating. But see it for another corner is better instead. [inaudible] Zoom in as close as we can so we can get that proper anchor playing. Kind of see it there it is. This swatch. So make sure that you get that. You want to align your art board exactly to the outline of your swatch. I go in, select this corner as well, let's move a little bit closer [inaudible] Say we go there. So that's one finished. That's my one swatch with houses, and I'll go over to this main print and do the same thing I just selected so I can see where that swatch bounces. I will click the "Artboard" and make the whiteboard around size. This one seems to appeal a bit. There's no item exactly on there. So that's good and helpful. Make sure it lines up to the anchor point. See I'm do the other corner. So that one finished, and then our last one, the bananas. Same thing, we pinpoint, in group point there. So you can see what we're doing here, and then zoom in to the other corner. Now we have those all finished, their setup and they will be a perfect repeat when you open them up or save them. Now we just have to make sure to add our background colors. Just move my swatches slightly so that I can pick out colors. This one, select that one. To add over here, you can just make a random box just as long as it covers the art board goes outside the edges. Click the blue one for the houses and make a box around that point. Then the last one is our bananas with a creamy background, do the same thing. So they're all in [inaudible]. So we need to select all of those. We go all three selected, and then I will right-click and "Arrange", "Sent to Back". Now we have all of your swatches setup, and you can see sometimes it does weird things like this one isn't fully colored, but that's just to save memory and space and stuff like that, and this one doesn't have all its lines. It's just important what is inside the actual swatch that everything is correct there, which you can see it is hasn't [inaudible] deleted anything important. Here are your final three swatches, and when you want to export them per say, spoon flower or something like that, you can go here and press "Export", Usually, spoon flower asks for a TIF or PNG or JPEG. Here you can choose which one you want here. Click "Selective" and use "Artboards" , and you can select all of them. Then you will get a swatch for each of your designs. Plus you'll have one that has the other designs if you need it, and it will save that. That's neat to know. I can't tell that for right now. If I sold the print, I would most likely have the same setup. I wanted to have all of the collections on the same. I'd have separate files or for each one I'd have one file for just the houses and I'd have the swatch ready like this. I might also have an example like this, and then the separate pieces that they could use it, they're going to use those for artwork, for other things. That's what I will do. I'm sitting up the final file for a customer to sell. I think that's all I wanted to show you and share with you. I hope that you've learned something new and have been inspired and all that step. That's it. We're finished with our little mini collection. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out there. I could spend even more time on creating different looks with this collection, and what's great also is that if you haven't sold these patterns in the next year, you can go revisit this. If you still like the look of everything, you could just revisit with a new color palette, and that could be something that causes someone to be more interested in it. So it's really interesting, I think. You're never stuck or never have just one option for a pattern collection or a pattern can always revisit it, can go back and add more details because it's so easy to manipulate in the pattern make tool that we went over. Don't ever feel locked inside of a grid. It's funny as this one did turn out into a grid format. But it's a half drop anyhow. I think I started. 8. Thank you for watching!: We're all finished and we've created a mini collection of patterns. Now, that you've seen all of my videos, I hope that you have gotten a good sense for the basics of pattern-making in my style. Like I said before, take what you want from my technique and using, tweak it, and make it your own. I hope that I have at least inspired you in some way or that you've learned some more tips and tricks that will help your efficiency while working, or your creativity, or anything like that. I can't wait to see your little mini collections and please do share them in the class project area. Feel free to ask me questions or bring up anything in the class discussion, if you have questions, or you're troubleshooting with the recolor artwork tool, or the pattern-make tool because there are some small things that can go wrong there. I will be happy to help. So until next time, I hope that you enjoy pattern-making as much as I do and you continue to create awesome work. I look forward to seeing your creations. Thanks so much again for taking my course. Bye