Transcripts
1. Triangle Patterns Introduction Graphic Design for Lunch : Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch Class, triangle inspired repeating patterns. 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. Now, today we're going to be creating patterns in Illustrator, and the central theme is that these are all based on a triangle. But every one of these patterns brings to the table new skills and tools and techniques. As you're watching these videos, you're going to see a prompt which ask, if you would 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 say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. 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 project. If you're ready now, let's get started with triangle patterns in Illustrator.
2. Pt 1 Multi Size Triangle Pattern: For the first of our triangular patterns, I'm going to choose File, and New. We're going to use a document 1920 by 1080 pixels in size. Now, if you're working with an earlier version of illustrator, your new document dialogues going to look like this, so just go ahead and create your document. We're going to work with triangles, so I'm going to the Polygon tool, I'll click once inside the document, set the number of sides to three, because that makes a triangle and set the radius to 100, I'll click OK. I'm going to turn off the stroke and fill this shape with a orange color. Now we're going to set the size of this triangle to a custom size. With the triangle selected up here in the tool options by, you're going to make sure that this little indicator between the width and the height has a line through it. This is what it looks like when it's enabled. This is what it looks like when it's disabled. We're going to set the width of the triangle to 100 pixels and the height of the triangle to 200 pixels. You have to unlock this tool or else you won't be able to set your own values for both the width and the height. Anytime you change one of them, the other would automatically change if you had this icon enabled. Now that we've got our first triangle, I'm going to hold the Alt or Option key on a Mac and drag a second one out of the way. This one's going to be every side, so it's half the size again. Its width is going to be 50 pixels and its height is going to be 100 pixels. We're going to move it down and line it up perfectly to the first triangle. Just using the smart guides to do this, I'll Alt or Option drag a duplicate away. Again, using a smart guys just to line these up, I'll select over these two, again, Alt or Option drag, I duplicate set of these two triangles out of the way, and I'm going to line these up again using my smart guides, so I'm just placing them in position. We're going to take this triangle Alt or Option drag a duplicate away and I'm going to set its width to 25, and its height to 50, so it's half the size. Again, I'm going to drag it into position here, Alt Option drag a duplicate away, grab these two, Alt Option drag a duplicate away, and then drag one to finish off. Now at this point you can check and say how your alignment is going. If you select over all of these shapes, you should end up with a selection whose height is 200 pixels. If it's not 200 pixels, something's out of alignment, and its width should be 237.5 pixels. It's the width of this one which is 100, plus two widths of 50, which is 200, and then half the width of this and half the width of this. When you add them all up, you get 237.5. Now if your width and height aren't exactly that, this is how you can fix it. First of all, select either these triangles which all should share a baseline. Go to the Align panel if you don't see it here in the toolbar, choose Window and then Align. Click the little fly-out menu, the hamburger menu, click Show Options and click on Align two key object and you're going to click again on this triangle. It's going to have a darker blue border telling you that it is the key object, and you'll click here on vertical aligned bottom. You'll do the same with these triangles at the top, so anything that's supposed to be lined up at the top you will select. Then again you're going to go aligned to key object, and again you're going to set this triangle is the key object because if anything moves, you don't want it to be this triangle one. Everything else to move relative to this one, and then you can click here on vertical aligned top. Now for the spacing, select the triangles across the base here that all should be butted up against each other, again, aligned to key object. Again, we don't want this triangle to move, everything else can. Set the space into zero and click here on horizontal distributes space. You can go to these triangles here, just these four, and do the same thing. Again, aligned to key object, make this one your key object, and do your distributes space, and then you could do it to this. We want to make sure that by the end of it you have a shape that is 200 tall and 237.5 wide. When you do, you're right to go ahead and make your pattern. But before you do so, you may want to re-color your triangles. I'm going to select this one, double click on the color, and I'm going to make it a darker color, so it's a darker version of this orange. I'm going to select a couple of other triangles that I'm also going to make this darker version. I'll click the eyedropper tool and just sample the color. I'll go ahead and grab a couple of triangles that I want to make considerably lighter. I'll double-click on this color and let's come across and choose a lighter color. Now at this point, what you do next is going to depend on what version of illustrator you're using. If you're using illustrators CS6 or later, then you have a tool that will make this pattern for you. You'll press Control or Command 0 just to zoom back out. Select over these triangles shapes and in those versions of illustrating your choose object pattern make. Now this won't be available if you're using Illustrator CS5 or earlier, but I'll show you in a minute how you can make this pattern. Let's go and click OK. In the pattern options dialog, you should have a height of 200, that's going to align each of these pattern pictures to each other. But you can see that you've got a big gap here. We're going to close up that gap. We're going to close up that gap by moving this triangle across to here, and so the width of this one is 100 and these two are 50s, so we want a width here of 200, we just to go to this and as type 200. When we do, you can see that the pattern has closed up really nicely. Now there are some options that we can use for this pattern even though we've already got a nice pattern here. I'm going to click here and choose brick by row, and you can see that the 200 pixel by 200 pixel pattern pace is just fine, but look how our brick by row is, it's given this a different look. With brick by row, you can have various offset. You could have a quarter offset or one third offset, or one half, which is typical brick pattern. But there are also other brick pattern options here that you could use. You have a fair bit of flexibility in exactly how these patterns are going to be put together. Now I'm liking this one, so what I've got is brick by row and a one-fifth pattern. If I like this, I'm just going to click Done. What I'm going to say on the screen is just my original pattern pace. I can move it just out of the way. Let's create a rectangle and fill it with our pattern just to see how it looks. I have the fill for the rectangle targeted here and in my pattern dialogue, here is my new pattern pace. I can just click to fill the rectangle with my new pattern, so I'm really liking that. But let's step back a couple of steps because if you're using Illustrator CS5 or earlier than you don't have that pattern make tool, and so you're going to need to make your pattern a little bit differently and here's how you do it. Let's just zoom into this. Now, we already know from having a look at the pattern in the pattern make tool that what we want is a patent pace that's 200 pixels by 200 pixels. What we're going to do is start off by just taking this design here, and we're going to make a duplicate of the whole thing. I'm just going to Alt or Option drag a pace away, and I'm going to line it up to the original pattern here. What I'm looking for is really just this triangle. I could even get rid of these extra triangles if I wanted to. But this is going to allow me to create an entire pattern pace. I'm now going to the Rectangle tool and I'm going to create a rectangle that's 200 pixels by 200 pixels in size. I'm going to align it pretty much over the middle of this shape, and I'm going to give it no fill and no stroke. I have my rectangle just placed here and it's over the middle of this big triangle and over the middle of this big triangle here, and aligned perfectly to the top and bottom of the rest of the pattern. This is all we need to create a pattern pace except that no fill, no stroke rectangle here or it's a square in this case, is at the top of the stack and we need it at the bottom. I'm going to select it and choose Object, Arrange, Send to back. If we check in the last pallet, we'll find that at the very bottom of everything is a no fill, no stroke rectangle, and that's really important because it's an important part of the pattern pace. It's marking out the bounds of the pattern repeat. I'm going to select over everything, and then open up the swatches panel. I'll drag and drop my patent pace into the swatches panel, and it's going to sit alongside the previous pattern pace. Now press Control or Command 0 and drag out a rectangle. I'll target the fill and fill the rectangle with my new pattern. This is the pattern that I've created using the old-fashioned technique, if you like, the technique that we used to use before we got the new pattern make tool. Then this is a slightly different pattern, it's created using the new pattern make tool. Things aren't aligned as well because I chose an offset that was not an exact replica of my pattern pace. There's the first of our triangular patterns created in Illustrator.
3. Pt 2 Multi Color Triangle Pattern: For our second triangle pattern, again, we're going to choose File and New. Again, I'm going to make a document 1920 by 1080 pixels in size. For this particular design, you're going to want a pretty big document because we're going to create all of the elements for our pattern in one instance. Of course, if you're working in an earlier version of Illustrator you're going to have this dialogue. Now, we're going to create a triangle. We're again going to the Polygon tool. Click once in the document and Click okay. Now this time we're going to lock our width and height because I'm going to change my width down to 50 pixels, which makes my height 42.2 pixels. I'm going to turn off the stroke on this shape and I'm going to fill it with just a red fill for now. This is going to be one of the colors for my pattern, but it doesn't have to be. I'm going to drag my shape down to the very bottom corner of this document. With it selected, I'm going to these nine little boxes here on the Tool Options panel. I'm going to click the left bottom one. I'm going to read off and make sure that the x and y values are the correct values. The x value is going to be zero and the y value is going to be the height of your document. In my instance, that's 1080 pixels. Now if you're working in a really early version of Illustrator, I'm thinking something like CS-3 or something. Then 0 0 is this origin. It changed in later versions. Most of us are going to say it's zero and then a value that's equivalent to the height of the document. Some of you work really old versions are going to see 0 0 here. We'll select this and choose Effect distort and transform and then transform. Turn preview on. We're going to move this something like 200 pixels. Then increase the number of copies so that you are going pretty much across the bottom of the document and click Okay. Now you'll choose Effect distort and transform and then transform again. Click to apply a new effect. Turn preview on. This time we're going vertically. I'm going to type minus 200 because we're going in an upwards direction. Then we'll add as many copies as we need to pretty much fill a document and click Okay. Now everything is attached to this shape here. These shapes don't exist, they'd just transformations of this shape. What we're going to do is burst amount so that they are individual shapes so we can select them and color them. I'll choose object, Expand Appearance, and then object Ungroup. I'm going to do object Ungroup until ungroup is no longer an option. That will ensure that when I look in the layers panel swiped, I get my layers panel here that I will have individual shapes. These will be pars. None of these shapes should be in groups. The next thing we have to do is we have to re-color the shapes. That's a very easy way to do that. It involves a script. What you're going to do is you're going to this side here and I'm going to give you the link for it. This is a JavaScript that allows you to randomly select shapes in a document. I'm going to click here on download. It's going to take about two seconds to download because it's a really small file. It's going to probably automatically extract if you're on a Mac, on a PC, you're going to get this dialogue and you're going to need to extract all files. Just Click extract all files. It looks like I've already done this. I'm just going now to the folder where everything is extracted to. I'm going to open up the JavaScript in Mac folder. Inside there is a file called random select dot jsx. That is the small script file that's going to do the work for us. You're going to select that and copy it. The place that you're going to put it in, if you're on a Mac, I'm going to put it up on the screen here on a PC this is how you're going to get there. You're going to go to your C drive or wherever illustrators installed into, and you're going to go to Program Files, then Adobe. Then you'll pick up your version of Adobe Illustrator for me, it's Illustrator CC 2017. Then you'll go to Presets. Choose your language option here, which will vary according to what language you're using, and go to scripts, and you'll paste it in here. Now, I've already pasted mine in, because you need to paste it into this location and then you need to restart. Illustrator knows that it's there. I've already done that. Let's go back to Illustrator. Once you have it installed, you're going to select all of these shapes and then you'll run your script. You do that by choosing File and then scripts, and you'll choose random, select. What you're asked for next is what percentage of the objects that you have selected right now, you want to select randomly. Well, I want to use four colors. My first percentage is going to be 25 percent because that's a quarter of the whole number of shapes that is currently selected. I'll click okay. It looks like nothing's happened, but it has came. Again I keep losing my layers palette here. We have a look in the last pallet will see that there are selections and they're random through the shapes. Approximately 25 percent of these shapes are now currently selected. I can go to the swatches panel and select the color. I'm going to choose green. Now I have 25 percent of my shapes colored green. I want to color the next 25 percent, but I want to cover only the ones that are currently red because the green ones are just fine. I'm going to select on this shape and I'm going over here to this tool. I'm going to click the drop down arrow and select Fill Color. Then I'll click on the tool. What's happened is that now it's gone and selected all the red shapes. Now if you don't have that tool, this is what you can do. Select over a red shape and go to Select Same Fill Color, and exactly the same thing will happen. Now we run our script again, file scripts, random select. But this time we've got 75 percent of our shapes selected. We want one third of those to be colored. We're going to type 33 percent so that we're selecting one third of what's left. I'll click okay. Now I'm going to select a blue color to color these width. If that's a bit, bright, I can just come in and lighten it up a little bit. Now I have approximately 25 percent color green and 25 percent colored blue, and I've got 50 percent left. I'm going to select one of my red shapes. Let's go back to selecting just the red shapes. Let's go and run our script with file scripts, random select. This time we've got 50 percent of what we started off with in terms of shapes. We've got two colors left. What we need is 50 percent of 50 percent. We're just going to type 50 percent in this time and click okay Now we'll get half of the remaining shapes selected. We can choose a color for them to make those purple. Again, this is way too dark. Cisco and make it a lighter purple. Now I want to finish off and just recolor my reds a little bit. I'm just going to go and select my reds. Let's just lighten up the red color a little bit. Just with that script, when you're using random select, if you want to color things in one of four colors, you're going to select 25 the first time, 33 percent the second time, and 50 percent the third time. Now we've got the elements that we need for our pattern pays. I'm going to go and select the Rectangle Tool and I'm going to be really careful about how and what i select. What I'm going to do is I'm going to select right down the edge of this document from the very top of this top shape, down to the very top of the bottom row of shapes. I'm going to go all the way across and stop just on the edge of the last row shapes. I'm going to make this no fill, no stroke, rectangle. I'm going to go to outline view just so I can make sure that everything is really well lined up. What I want to make sure here is that I have none of this bottom triangle selected, but I'm very tight on that bottom triangle. I want to make sure up the top here that I have the very top of this triangle selected but no space above it. Over here, I wanted to make sure that my selection is running right along the edge of these triangles, but not selecting them. On this side, I want to make sure that my selection is just right down the edge of those triangles. Everything's looking pretty good. Going back to preview view and let's go back to our full size document. This no fill, no stroke rectangle is now marking out the area that is covered by my pattern pace. The thing I need to do before I create my Pattern pace so is to put it behind everything because the rules are in Illustrator that you can use a no fill, no stroke rectangle to mark out where the pattern goes, but it has to be at the back of everything. With it selected, I'll choose object, arrange, send to back. It's now behind everything. Now I can choose Select All and I select absolutely everything. Open up my swatches panel, I'm just going to drag and drop my Swatch into my swatches panel. I'm going to drop it in next to one of the existing patterns. Now let's just zoom out and I'm going to create a second art board. I'm going to make this the same size as the first. I'm going to create a rectangle that is the exact same size as the art board, 1920 by 1080 in my case and click okay. I'm going to center it over the art boards. I'm going through the align options here. I'm going to click the hamburger menu here, click Show Options. I'm going to align to art board in this instance, I'm going to align this rectangle to the art board. I have it's filled targeted, so I'm going to open up my swatches panel. I'm going to click on my pattern swatch. I'm going to re-size it with object transform scale. I'm going to scale it down to 50 percent. I'm going to disable transform objects. I just want to transform my pattern and I'll click Okay. Now at this point we can just zoom into our pattern and make sure that all our triangles are intact. There's not bits missing off any of our triangles which there are not. There is a second repeating pattern of triangles here in Illustrator. This time we've got a patent that doesn't even really look like a pattern. We've made it so big that it's really hard to see where it repeats. It does repeat, it's a seamless repeating pattern of very small triangles in Illustrator.
4. Pt 3 Create the edges for a freeform triangle pattern: For our next triangle pattern, we're going to create a very small document. I'm going to choose file, new, and I'm creating a document that's a 300 pixels by 300 pixels in size. In earlier versions have illustrated just type 300 and 300 and click create document. Now we're going to create a series of triangles down one side of this art boards. We going to the pen tool. I'm using a white fill and a black stroke. I'm just going to draw out a triangle. Then I'm going to start the next triangle here. Click once and then click it back on the anchor points for the first triangle. I'm going to come over here and create another triangle. I'm going to work all the way down this side of the art board making triangle's. I'm going to try and make sure that they don't look too even. Their starting points are going to be in different places and they're going to be different shaped triangles, but they're all going to be attached to each other. I'm making sure that I'm picking up these anchor points and I'm making sure that I am creating closed shapes every time. I'm going to continue down here until I'm just over the edge of the bottom of the art board and holding down the space bar and just moving the art boards so I can see it a bit more clearly. Again, coming back down here. My last triangle needs to be over the bottom corner of the art board. I'm just going to zoom out and we'll see what we've got. Well, we've got an art board with triangles all the way down one side. The top corner here is not touched. There's not a triangle here, but there is a triangle over the bottom corner. That's really important. Now we're going to select all of those triangles, we will just double check before we go that everything is lined up by choosing view and then outline. If these weren't lined up exactly, you'd see double lines here. You just need to adjust some using the direct selection tool. Mine are looking just fine. I'm going to make a duplicate of these and move them at the same time. I'll choose object, transform, move. I want to move in a zero horizontal direction and I want to move in a minus 300 vertical directions. I want this to go up the top here. Now, in really, really early versions of illustrating, you might have to type 300 positive in here rather than negative. But for most of you, it will be minus 300. You'll be able to see it when you've got preview on, you want your second set of shapes to be way off the top of the art board here and you'll click Copy. Now at this stage, their shapes are still selected. We're going over here to this swatches panel and we're going to fill them with a different color. We just want to keep separate the two sets of shapes that we have. Now we're going to zoom into this position here, because this is where we need to join the shapes together. I'm thinking at this point what we could do is make this shape a little difference. I'm going to select over the orange corner and I'm just going to move this a little bit so that I can fit another set of triangles in here. Actually I'm going to go off the board with this one. Then, again using orange and black, I'm going to the pen tool. I'm going to make some triangles to fill in this area. I'm going to click over one of these Anchor points. Now if the anchor point disappears, when you click on it, you'll just undo it and start again and perhaps pick a different anchor point, start at. I'm able to select this so it's working just fine. Again, I'm going to create a closed shape here and then I'm going to make one in here. Again, picking up these anchor points so my triangles are overlapping perfectly. I'll double-check with view and then outline, make sure my lines are correct which they are and I'll go back to preview mode. I'm going to zoom out again. Now the set of triangles that I just altered with the orange ones. I want to keep the orange ones. I wanted to discard the white ones. I'm going to come down here, select either all of the white ones and just delete them. Now, I've got a set of orange ones. I'm going to select them and I'm going to copy and move them down 300 pixels. Object, transform, and move, zero horizontal, 300 vertical, and I'm going to make a copy. Now, this set is still selected, so I am going to quickly change its color. The reason why I wanted to do that, is I want to show you that these triangles are now perfectly lined up, so they're duplicating perfectly. For that reason, we no longer need the orange ones. We're just going to delete them. Because we know that if we take this yellow set or yellow and green set and duplicate them, they're going to intersect perfectly. Now we need to do the bottom of the art boards, so again we're going back to the pen tool and provided we have a different color fill, that's all we need. I'm going to zoom in here and I'm going to make triangles across the bottom edge of the art board. Again, picking up the previous triangles, so I'm going to make sure that they are aligned perfectly to the existing anchor points. Again, I'm going to move pretty quickly because what's important here is just being able to show you how you're going to get everything to line up perfectly around the edges. Making sure that I'm making closed shapes every time and that my triangles are intersecting each other perfectly. I'm going to stop before I get to the very edge of the art board, I'm going to zoom back out. These shapes here across the bottom of the art board or going to duplicate. I'm going to go and select these shapes, so anything that intersects or touches the bottom edge of the art board. I'm just going to select either all of these, and I'm going to make a copy of them and move them. I'm going to choose object, transform, move. This time we're going horizontally, 300 pixels and we're going vertically, no pixels at all. Again, I want to make a copy, so I'll click Copy. Again, I want to recolor these so I'm going to just fill them with a totally different color. This shape here and this shape here are the exact same shape. We also know that they fit into this top corner perfectly so the shapes we can't alter our these here. We're going to leave all of the red ones alone, and we're just going to fill in the gaps with some orange ones. I'm going to zoom into this area here and I just need to fill in this gap. I could change this triangle if I wanted to say, what am I going to do is actually go and change this point of this triangle? I'm just going to bring it down here because that's a nice, easy solution to fill in that gap. Again with orange color selected, I'm just going to fill in this last piece. Now, I just lost that point so that obviously wasn't a good point to start my triangle. I am going to undo that and let's try from a different point. It looks like I've got everything here. Let's just zoom back out. Let's choose view and then outline view just to make sure that everything is lined up. If they're not, you're going to say double lines is going to be really obvious that they're not overlapping. I'll go back to view preview. I'm going to remove these red shapes, leaving only the orange ones behind. Let's go and recopy that and make sure that it all works. I'm going to select everything that is over the bottom edge of this art board. I'm going to choose object, transform, move. I'm going to do a 300 horizontal and a zero vertical move. I'm going to make a copy and everything is intersecting perfectly. I can just delete that selected group because I don't actually need them. Now at this point, I suggest that you save this design because what you've got is some triangles that are going to repeat perfectly all the way around this shape. You may want to use these triangles for more than one pattern. Saving this design as it is right now will shortcut the process of creating different patterns in future. I'm going to save this. I'm going to come back in the next video and show you how to finish this pattern or at least one iteration of it
5. Pt 4 Complete the free form triangle pattern: I've gone ahead and saved this file. So I'm ready now to go ahead and to make my pattern. Now I'm going to use a series of different color oranges. So I'm going to select either all of these shapes first of all, and I'm going to color them the base orange color, and then I'm going to select a few of these shapes by shift clicking on them. I'm going to change them into another color in this color scheme. I'm going to continue to do that with every other shape until I get a series of different colored triangles. I don't want two triangles of the same color to be sitting right next to each other if I can help it. So I've got a fair variety around the edge so far. Now, these are going to be perfect repeats, so it's time to go and make those repeats. But it's important to color these triangles before you do so because the colors on this side of the art board have to be exactly the same as the ones used on the other side or else the pattern is not going to work. So I'm selecting here everything that overlaps this edge of the art board, and I'll choose object transform move. Now I'm going to move the 300 pixels horizontally, 0 pixels vertically, and I'm going to make a duplicate, so I'll click "Copy", and so everything's lining up perfectly here, except I've got some colors that aren't working well. This color, I can change this on I can't unless I change both pieces, but this one I could. So let's just go and make it a different color. Now we're going to take everything that intersects this bottom edge of the art board. So we're going to select everything here, and we're going to duplicate it again up the top. So object transform move. We're going to move it 0 pixels horizontally minus 300 vertically and we're going to click "Copy", so we have a duplicate and so this is what our pattern is going to look like. Now, we do have a problem here with same color pieces next to each other. So I'm going to select this piece, and its companion piece over here, which is the exact same one and then I can change their color. But if they're not both selected, then I can't change the color, otherwise the pattern is going to be broken later on. So we've got our colors in place and we can change these later on with a recolor tool. But for now, we're just going to settle with that. Now it's time to fill in the middle of the document. So I'm going to zoom in a little bit, so I can see a bit more clearly where I'm working and I'm going to my Pen Tool and I'm going to start making triangles to fill in these gaps. So I'm going to click on these anchor points, and just make my triangle. Once I've made it, if I want to change its color and just go tap the letter "I" to go to the Eye Dropper tool, I can click on a different triangle to borrow its colors because the triangle I've just made is still selected. So now I'm going to go ahead and just make my triangles and color them as I go, just making sure that I'm overlapping the previous triangles as I make them. So I'm using pay for the Pen Tool to pick that up and then I for the Eye Dropper tool. Periodically I'm going to use the view outline option just to double-check that all my lines are perfect. I'm going to speed up the video as I just finished doing these triangles and will come back when I'm ready to take the next step. A final check and outline view will tell you if you've got all of your triangles right. All of mine look just fine. So what I'm going to do next is, I'm going to make my pattern pace. So I'm just going to zoom out a little bit. I'm going to make a rectangle that has the exact same size as my art board, and that is 300 by 300 pixels. So I'll select that and click "OK". I'm going to align that to the art board and I'm going to remove its stroke and its fill. Once that's done, I'm going to choose object arrange center back because it needs to be at the back of everything for it to become the border of our Pattern paste. So that's just going to mark out our patterns Swatch. So I'm going to select over absolutely everything. I'm going to open up the Swatches panel and just drag and drop this into the pattern area of the Swatches panel. So that's now created as a repeating pattern tile. So I can go ahead now and create another art board. So I'm just going to make this one 600 pixels wide and 300 pixels tall. So it's pretty much the same height as the original art board. I'll make a rectangle that is going to fit over the top of it and I'm going to align it to that second art board. Now, I'm going to bring its fill to the four and I'm going to click on the swatch that I just created, and that fills it with a repeating pattern swatch. So I'll choose object and then transform and I'll choose scale this time. Because what I want to do is to scale my pattern but not my object. So I'll just click, "Okay". So this is a repeating pattern we've created a tile for an organic style repeating triangle pattern in Illustrator. This is our pattern tile, and this is what it looks like in place in a rectangle. Now, if we're not happy with it, if we want to make some changes to it, we could do so. I'm a little bit concerned about what looks like to be a straight line through here and it's caused by these anchor points here. So I'm just going to zoom into the area where the issues are and I'm going to the Lasso tool. I'm going to choose the Lasso tool here, and I want to Lasso all of these points here. Then I want to go to the Direct Selection tool. I'm just going to move them all slightly out of alignment. So that's going to break that vertical line. I could come down here and take this step because they're also in that sort of vertical line. I'm going to the Direct Selection tool once I've Lassoed them, and let's pull them in the opposite direction. So now as I zoom out you will see I've broken that line that I had a little bit. Let's zoom out yet again. I'm going to select either the pattern paste again. I'm going to drag and drop it into Swatches panel. But this time I want to replace the first swatch because I wanted to go straight over the top. So I'm holding the "Alt + O" option key as I drop it over the top of this swatch here and that automatically replaces that anywhere where it was in use in the document. Now you'll see that very quickly we've got rid of that obvious vertical line. Once we'd create our Pattern paste provided we only make alterations to the shapes that are right inside this, not along the edges, then we're going to have a same as repeating pattern. So there's the third of our triangle star patterns in Illustrator.
6. Project and wrapup: Your project for this class will be to create one or more of the triangle patterns that you've seen created here, and to post an image of your pattern in the class project area. I hope that you've learned things in this class about Illustrator of which you were previously not aware. Now, as you're watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which asked if you would have recommended this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class and learn things from it, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up and secondly, write just a few words about why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too may enjoy and learn from. 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 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.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
