Transcripts
1. Houndstooth and Rose - Introduction - A Graphic Design for Lunch ™ Class: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Vector Halftone Shading and Houndstooth in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. In this episode, we're going to create two things. Firstly, we're going to take a rose photo that we're downloading from the web, and we're going to trace it into a vector, and we're going to add a halftone pattern to it. Then we're going to explore creating a houndstooth pattern. We're going to put both of them together, and when we're done, we're going to look at recoloring the rose just to get a different effect. I really hope that you'll enjoy this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch and everything that you'll learn in it. Let's get started with our Houndstooth and Rose Project.
2. Houndstooth and Rose - Part 1: If you'd like to follow along with this video tutorial using the exact same image that I've used, you can do so. You can download this image from publicdomainpictures.net. Just go to the web link that I've given you and click here on "Free Download" and you can download the image. Now I'm going to take it to Photoshop and do some pre-preparation in Photoshop. If you don't have Photoshop and if you want to use the pre-prepared image, then I'll give you a download link to get that too. But if you do have Photoshop and if you do want to see how the image is prepared, then watch the end of this video. Otherwise, just skip ahead to the next one. I have the rose open here in Photoshop and I have the last palette visible, which you can get to by choosing Window and then Layers. Now you should be able to do this, even if you haven't used Photoshop much at all. You're going to click on the background layer and drag this lock icon onto the trash can to just make it a regular layer. That's going to allow us in a minute to get rid of the background for this rose. Then go up here and locate the Quick Selection Tool. A setting of about 30 is a good setting for this. I'm just going to drag now paint over the rose itself. As I do, Photoshop's making a selection for me. Now, if it goes too far, don't worry, because you can always get this back by holding the Alt or Option key and just paint out that area, so you're deselecting it. You just want the marching ants around the very edge of your rose. Photoshop's made a really good selection here, and it certainly pays to choose a rose that's pretty well isolated from its background because you don't want to waste a lot of time in Photoshop, that you could be spending having a lot of fun in Illustrator. I have my rose selected, so now I want to get rid of the background. To invert my selections of the background selected and not the rose, I'll choose Select and then Inverse. Because the background is now selected and because I have this as a regular layer, not the background layer, I can just press "Delete". There's a isolated rose. I'm going to come in now and crop it. I'm just going to grab the crop tool and just drag in on the crop a little bit, because I don't want to take excess image into Illustrator. I'm just sizing my crop rectangle and click the check mark. Now before we go to Illustrator, we can do a couple of things that will help us produce a slightly better result inside Illustrator. To do this, I'm going to apply a curves adjustment to this image. I'm going to choose Image, Adjustments, and then Curves. Now remembering that we're just working on this image for the point of pre-preparing it for Illustrator, we're not doing all unusual photo tricks that we would do in Photoshop. I also want this to be easy enough for you to do, even if you're not familiar with using Photoshop. I'm going to drag down, just click and drag down on the bottom of this curve here to make it a slightly down curve. I'm going to click on the line here and drag it up a little bit. What that's doing is adding some contrast into this, so we have some dark layers and some lighter layers. That's going to be pretty important later on because we're going to convert these into vectors inside Illustrator. So you want a pretty good contrast here, some light bits and some dark bits. When you're happy with what you've got, just by dragging out on this curve, just click "Okay". If you make a mistake and it's very easy to make a mistake in here and just turn this into garbage, then all you need to do is hold the Alt or Option key and click "Reset" and that just sends it back to the way it was. You can go back and try again to get your curve and the additional contrast in this image and click "Okay". The other thing we can do is flatten some of the colors in the image. We just do this by running a filter. Choose Filter and then Noise and then Median. What median does is it flattens color in the image. At the moment, we have a radius of six pixels. If I drag this all the way up, you'll say that the image just becomes a big blob. Obviously, the values that we made are pretty small. I'm just going to test three. Now I think three is probably a pretty good value here. We're getting a little bit of less detail in the rose by doing that. Choose a radius of, say, two or three pixels and click "Okay". Now we're ready to head to Illustrator. To do that, I'm going to save this image so I could use it over and over again if I wanted to. I'll choose File, Save As because I don't want to overwrite the original, but I do want to keep a copy of it. I'm now in the folder in which the original image was stored, but I'm going to choose from the Save As Type drop-down list, JPEG, and I'm going to call this "Isolated-easy-does-it- rose" and click "Save". The rose image's now saved, so we're finished with all the work that we need to do in Photoshop, and we're headed to Illustrator.
3. Houndstooth and Rose - Part 2: We're now ready to create the image that we're going to be working in. I'm choosing "File" and then "New". I'm making an image that's 1,000 by 600 pixels in size, RGB color mode, and click "Okay". Now if you opted to do the Photoshop work yourself, this is the point at which you'll bring in your image. If you opted not to do it, follow the link here to download the image that you can use. Click to download the image that I've pre-prepared for you and you'll save it to disk. Then we'll all go and get the images that we're going to be working with. It'll be the image that you created yourself or the one I created for you. We'll do it in the same way. We'll choose "File" and then "Place". Go and select the image and click "Place". Then just drag out a place for it inside your Illustrator document. Go to the last palette and you'll want a couple of versions of this image. You'll see it here once. Click on that and drag and drop it onto this new icon here, and that will create a duplicate of it. You can lock down and hide that one for now because we're just going to be working on the bottom one. Because this is a bitmap image, Illustrator's already identifying and suggesting that we may want to trace it. I'll click "Image Trace". Now, the first trace always looks absolutely horrible but that's fine because you just know it's going to look horrible and you get a chance to make changes to it. Click the "Image Trace" panel and click "Preview" off because we want to change settings in this panel before Illustrator takes off and retraces it. Instead of black and white, we want to trace in color. We want to use a limited color palette because we want less than a full span of colors. I suggest that you start with something like eight and just see how that goes. Now in the Advanced panel here, you get to choose paths, corners, and noise. The rough rule of thumb for this is that if you drag paths and corners to a small value, then you drag noise the other way. This is going to give me a very smooth result. Now, it looks like I've snapped Preview on there that I didn't mean to. I've lost my settings here for some reason but let's just reset those. I have a very low value for paths and corners, a high value for noise. That's going to give me a very smooth result. Now, I've already traced this image before, and I know that there's a little bit of white in there that I actually want to keep so I'm not going to click "Ignore White". I'm going to get rid of the white later on that I don't need. I'll click "Preview" and that's going to set off the trace. You just wait until Illustrator has finished tracing the image. Then look at what you've got and decide whether that's what you want. Now that is a pretty good trace, but you may want to try lesser numbers of colors. Let's try six, for example. I'll type six and press "Tab" and that gives me a sort result. You could also try a few more so let's try 10. All you're looking for is a result that you like. I actually really quite like 10, so I think I'm going to call that good. But you probably wouldn't want much more than 10 colors in the image. The beauty of choosing 10 is that I've lost these white areas in the image so I'm actually going to get a slightly better result. Now that I've finished my trace, I'm going to click here on "Expand" and that expands the image into a vector image. Now, I have vector shapes. I'm going to click on this and I'm going to choose "Object Ungroup" so that I can start working with the individual shapes. What I'm looking for is the last shape so if I go down in the last palette and click on the last shape and just isolate it, that's going to be the white. The white background if there is any, generally ends up being the very last shape. I'm just going to pick it up and put it in the trash can because I don't want the white shape, but everything else I do want. I've just wound back up to the last palette and here are all the objects here. I'm just going to click on the very top one and that will select everything except the duplicate rows, which is exactly what I want to select is everything except, and I'm just going to group that again, "Object", "Group". Now, that just tucks it away in a neat group, which allows me to turn it on and off at will and also lock it down very, very easily. I'm going to do both of those things. I'm going to lock it down and I'm going to turn it off. I'm going back to the second version of the rows that I had. I'm going to unlock it and we're now ready to go ahead and to create the halftone.
4. Houndstooth and Rose - Part 3: To make the halftone effect, I'm selecting the second version of the rose, one one hasn't been converted to anything yet. I'm going to choose Object and then Rasterize because I want to work with the color in this image. Until I rasterize it, I just can't do that. I'm just going to click Okay, just select the default options. Now, with the shape still selected, I'm going to choose Edit and then Edit Colors because there's a tool in Illustrator that lets you convert an image to grayscale. I'm going to click Grayscale. Now, I have a grayscale version of my rose. This is what I'm going to convert into my halftone. To do this, I'll choose Effect and then Pixelate, and then Color Halftone. Now, pretty much all you need to know about the Color Halftone dialogue is that the maximum radius is going to be the largest of the dots in your halftone. You want to set it to something that's going to work for your image. The screen angles, it doesn't matter too much what they setup because we're working with a grayscale image. I'm just going to test this by clicking Okay. That's my halftone effect. Now, I might think that my dots are too big or too small. I actually think they're just a little bit on the small side. I'm going to open the Appearance panel because here in the appearance for this particular rose image is the color halftone effect. I can just click on it and get my dialogue back. I'm just going to make a change and set it to 12 pixels for my maximum radius and try that. If that's not enough, just click it again and make a change. You can go larger for larger dots or smaller for smaller dots. I think 13 is going to work pretty well for this image. Now, I've got my halftone effect over the top of my original rose. Let's just bring the rose back. I've just turned its Eyeball icon on, so we should be able to see it. Well, we can't see it right now because we're looking at a black and white image and we can't see through it because it's fully opaque. What we need to do is to blend this halftone effect in with the layer underneath. I'm going to click here on the halftone layer, and I'm going to click on the Appearance panel for it. Because here in the Opacity options, are blend modes. These are blend modes that are similar to those that you would find, for example, in Photoshop. If I click Multiply, then I'm going to be able to blend the halftone in with the rose image underneath. Now, that's a pretty good effect. But in the next step, what we're going to do is we're going to actually hide the halftone effect in the lighter areas of the image. We need to go and build a mask and then mask out the halftone effect. Let's see how we do that.
5. Houndstooth and Rose - Part 4: For our mask, we're going to build it up in the "layers" panel. I'm opening up the layers panel. I'm going to click here to add a new layer just above everything else. I'm going to use that new layer to build up the mask. I don't want my halftone image to be visible right now, so I'm going to lock it so it won't move, but I'm also going to hide it. I'm going to unlock the traced version of the image. We've got the image that is the traced version, full of vector shapes. Now I want to select the lightest area on the image, but when I click on it, you'll see that it's grouped. Right now let's just go and ungroup it, we'll do "object ungroup". I can click again now on the lightest area on the image that I can see, and I'm able to select it. I want to select every other lighter area, but I don't want to have to do it by hand. Let's choose select, same, fill color, and illustrator will select all the lighter areas in the image for us. Now I want to copy those, so I'm going to choose "edit copy". Then I'm going up to this new layer that I created, I'm going to choose edit, paste and place. This is going to be the beginning of my mask. I'm just making a duplicate and tucking it away. Let's go back down to the rose. We need to select Layer 1 so that we're working on Layer 1 again. Now I'm going to select some slightly darker areas, the ones that are next to the light area. I'll click on one of them, select, same, fill color, edit, copy. I'm going to my Layer 2 and then we're going to choose edit, paste in place. Let's go back to Layer 1. I'm going to select the next lightest color. You'll find that generally these colors are lined up next to each other, you can say this is the lightest and then this one, and then probably this one. Let's choose, select, same, fill color, edit, copy, go up to Layer 2, edit, paste in place. Now I've selected the three lightest colors in the image, I think that's probably all I'm going to need to work with. I'm just going to lock down this layer for the moment, and let's go and say what we've got on the topmost layer, I'm also going to turn this one off. These are the lightest areas in the image. I'm going to select everything on Layer 2 and I'm going to fill it with black. I'm going to go up here and click on "black". All of those light areas of the image are now black. I'm going to select them, I'm going to drag all over them with the select tool and choose edit and then copy. I have a copy of this on the clipboard. Now let's go back to the layers and let's hide that mask layer, the bits of pieces of the image that we plan to use for a mask. Let's make our other layer visible again. What we want to do here is to start working on the halftone. I'm going to unlock the halftone and I'm going to make it visible. I'm going to click on it, so I have the halftone only selected. I'm going to the appearance panel, and we're ready to create our mask. Now, creating a mask can be a little bit difficult, but if you step through the process with me, it's going to be really easy. We've got our black areas already on the Windows clipboard or on the Mac clipboard, and we're going to click here on "Opacity". This is going to open up this little dialogue, and what we want to do is to make a mask, so I'm going to click "Make Mask". Then I'm going to click in here to select the mask. I need to make sure that there is a border around this little mask box, and I'm going to turn clip off. Now I'm going to choose edit, paste in place. What that does is it pastes the image that I had on the clipboard into the mask. If you open up the opacity dialogue for this shape, this is what you should see, your halftone effect in here, and a black and white mask here. You should see this amount of black and this amount of white, because that's pretty much the ratio that we want. Clip should be turned off and Invert Mask should be turned off as well. If you've got everything looking like this, then everything is perfect, and you've got one more step to do. Right now you're editing the mask, and you can see that because it's got a little black surround around it, and up here too, it'll say opacity mask. You have to leave the opacity mask before you can go back to working on this image inside illustrator. What you want to do is to click here on the halftone. You have to do that, and then you can just click away from everything, and you've got your halftone effect. It's been removed in the areas where the image is lighter, and it's only applied in the areas where the image is darker. Now if you want it to be even less obvious than it is, go here into the opacity option and just dial down the opacity a little bit. That's going to blend the halftone dots into the underlying image, but of course, they're going to be completely removed from the areas where the image was lightest. I'm dialing this down to maybe about 50 percent, I think that'll be a good value here. It's a nice effect for me, so I'm just going to click away from the dialogue and I can close up the appearance panel. We're ready now to go ahead and to create our houndstooth pattern for our rose.
6. Houndstooth and Rose - Part 5: Next up we're going to create our houndstooth pattern and houndstooth an interesting pattern because it's actually a tessellation. I've just opened up my last palette and I have my mask here. I don't need them any longer, so let's just drag and drop the mask onto the trash can. But I'm going to add a new layer. I'm going to click here on the new "Layer" icon, and I'm going to use that new layer to build up my pattern. At this stage, we're going to lock down the rest of the image and just turn the visibility off. We just working on layer 2. Now the houndstooth pattern we can create from a rectangle. I'm going to click here on the ''Rectangle tool''. It's just a regular rectangle. I'm going to click in the middle of the image until this dialog opens. I'm going to create a rectangle that is half as wide as it is tall. I'm going to settle for 50 wide and 100 tall, and click ''Okay''. I'm filling it with black. Black is a good color for this. I'm going to zoom in so I can see things pretty clearly here because I want to work on this shape. I'm going to click away from the shape so it's not selected. I'm going to click on the "Pen tool'' now if you hate the pen tool, that's fine. I totally understand, but we're not going to do anything really significant with it except just click. It's pretty easy pen tool operation. I'm going to select a different color though it's something that's really going to contrast. I'm selecting pink. I'm going to come down here at the very bottom of this shape and I'm going to click when I say the word anchor appear because I wanted to start my shape in exactly same position as the corner of this rectangle. Now I'm going to hold the Shift key down because I want this angle to be 45 degrees. I'm just going to come up here to about this dimension. This is not Rocket Science. It doesn't matter how far you've come in, but I want it to be about the looks of this and I'm going to click once. Now I'm going to hold the Shift key again, and I'm going up here. I want to be in about this amount of space from the corner of the image. But again, I need to hold Shift because I need this to be a dead straight line. I'm going to go here and just click once. Then I'm coming over here again holding the Shift key, and I just want to line this up with the very edge of this shape where it says ''Path''. I'm going to click once. I'm going down here, again holding the Shift key to line up with this anchor, click and across here and click. That should give me a shape. That's exactly what I want. But I've got a wiggly base on my shape and I think, well, the side of it's looking good but the basis of bit wiggly. I'm just going to straighten it out before I go. I'm just going to zoom in here, get this direct selection tool, click on this "Anchor" point here because I think it just needs to be brought down. I'm going to hold the Shift key as I drag it down. I'm just eyeballing it to look for a straight line and I've managed to get a perfect straight line. Let's just press "Control zero'' to get back to the image itself. I'm going to the selection tool and I'm going to put this pink shape back in on top of the black one. Let's just zoom in so we can say what's happening here. I want to make sure it's perfectly aligned with the bottom of the black shapes. I could select both and just click here on "Vertical Align Bottom". That'll make sure that both the shapes are lined up vertically. I'm going to line them on this side as well. I'm just going to click here to align them perfectly on the right as well. Now I want two copies of these pink shapes. I'm going to choose edit copy, and then edit paste in place that I want them on top of each other. Let's go to the last pallet and let's open up this layer that we're working on. You can see that we have a pink shape, a pink shape, and a black shape. Well, I'm going to select one of the pink shapes and then Shift-click on the black shapes. Both of these selected. I'm going to the pathfinder and I'm going to select minus front because we know the pink shapes are founder to the black one. When I click "Minus front", what I end up with is a pink shape and a black shape without its bits. Well, it's got an extra little bit in there. Let's just zoom in and see if we can say that what's happening here so we can get rid of it. Well, I'm going to select this black shape and I'm going to select then on the direct selection tool. There's a loose anchor point here. I'm just going to click it with the direct selection tool and click "Delete" and it just disappears. You might find that you get a trailing pace or two, but you might be lucky and get it all in the first time. Now I'm going to put this shape back on top of this one. Again zooming in just to make sure that everything's nicely aligned. When I've got them both lined up like this, I'm just going to select either both of them and click "Unite". That makes one shape out of the two. This is half of my hands to his pattern, so I'll choose object, transform, reflect. I'm going to click "Preview" because I want to reflect over the vertical and I want to make a copy, so I'll click "Copy". Now I'm going to drag the second shape away from the first. I'm going to stick them together looking like this. Select either both of them and click "Unite". Now I have one shape. This is the biases of my houndstooth. I'm going to rotate it 45 degrees, so I'm going to drag it around holding the Shift key to rotate it to a 45-degree angle. Before I leave here, I'm going to make it black because it's going to look a hollow, better, bang, black, houndstooth. Now press "Control" or "Command zero'' to zoom out and we'll make the pattern with the shapes selected. We'll choose object, pattern, make, and click "Okay".I'm going to link these two boxes here, so make sure that this is turned on. I'm going to click in one of the boxes and just start pressing the down arrow key. I can press ''Shift down arrow'' if I like. I just want to join these two shapes together. I just want the pointy end of this shape to intersect with the path that I've created. When I've done that, I've got my houndstooth. I'm just going to click "Done". I'm finished with this shape so I can delete it. The houndstooth pattern is here in my swatches. Now I'm going to create a rectangle that is a size of the art board. Just going to click and drag it out here. With the fill selected, I'm going to click on my "Houndstooth" pattern. It's way too big. I'm going to choose object transform scale. I have preview turned on. I want to transform my patterns so I want transform patterns selected by do not want to transform these objects. I'm just going to make it, well, let's start with 25 percent. That's a bit big and I think it could probably come down to about 15 percent. Well, I'm thinking even smaller. I'll make seven percent and click "Okay". Now let's go to the last pallet and bring back our rose. Here is filled houndstooth layer. Here is layer one, which has the halftime rose on it. I'm just going to bring my rose back into visibility and I'm going to drag the houndstooth lab below the rose layer, which is just putting the rose on top. At this point, we've essentially finished the project that we came here to create. There is a way, however, changing the colors of the rose. If you wanted to see how to do that, we're just going to finish that off in the next video.
7. Houndstooth and Rose - Part 6: If you want to change the color of your rose, you can do so, but I suggest that first of all, you save your rose. Make sure you choose File Save As, so you have a saved version of the colorway that you have here. Now let's go and change it. I'm going to open up the layers panel. I'm going to unlock the rose layer and I'm just going to select it because it's only the rose that we want to change. Then I'm going to the color swatches panel. I'm going to click here on New Color Group. By default it will show selected artwork. Just click "Okay." This adds a new color group of the colors that are in the rose at the moment. With the rose still selected, go ahead here and click on Edit or Apply Color Group. Then click "Edit." These are the colors in the rose currently. Now what you can do is just drag around here. The colors will maintain this same relationships so that you'll get this monochromatic color scheme, that is the colors in your rose. If you drag inwards, you'll get a more pastel color rose. If you drag out, what you're going to get a less pastel, more saturated color rose. Now, these colors can be individually dragged in and out to be more or less saturated. Let's go back into the sort here. You can drag them in or out. That will allow you to create this interesting effect by isolating some colors in the rose and making them darker or lighter. But essentially because the colors are locked down in relation to each other, because this is locked, you can't pull them into another color area. If you want to pull them into another color area, you'll need to unlock them. Once they're unlocked, you can go and do things like this. You can start bringing interesting colors into the rose. You can even bring complimentary colors. You can do all things with your rose at this point and hello, if you've come this far, you've done a lot of work, so you may as well enjoyed. Go make your rose whatever color you like, and just have fun with this dialogue because you certainly deserve it. This is a big project and this is the fun end of the project. If you get a color combination that you like, click here on New Color Group, and that will just save it as a color group and click "Okay." Your project for this course is to obviously make your own halftone pattern and then go and find a rose image, something that you've shot yourself or something that you've found on a stock site, convert it to a vector and apply the halftime effect to it. Post an image of your completed project in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, creating half tone rose effects and hounds tooth patterns. I'll look forward to seeing you in another episode soon.
8. Houndstooth and Rose Additional Video: This is an add on video for the Houndstooth and Roses project. Now, the reason why I'm doing this video is that, one of my students asked what would happen or how they would do it if they were using Illustrator CS5, they're actually using 5.1. But Illustrator versions prior to CS6 did not have the pattern-making tool in them. If you're using an earlier version of Illustrator, you won't be able to make the Houndstooth pattern the same way as everybody else. I'm going to show you how you do it in earlier versions of Illustrator. Now I've got the basic hounds to shape and what we need to do now, is to make our pattern. Now, I've got the Move tool selected. What I'm going to do is select my pattern piece. I'm going to hold the Alt key as I drag a few copies of this away. I'm going to settle for five right now. Now, we're going to build this pattern just out of the spaces and we're not going to rotate them. We're going to rotate the pattern later on once we've actually got everything working. It's just going to be easier to do it that way. I'm going to zoom in over here. I'm just going to click the Zoom tool, zoom in over here because I want to see these spaces clearly. With the Move tool, I'm going to select this piece and just move it, so it just touches the very top edge of this one. Then I'm going to hold down the Spacebar so I can see what's happening over here. I'm just going to move this piece out of the way for now and I'm going to move this one in, so it's in exactly the same place. Now we need these two pattern pieces, this one here and this one here to be on the same level. I'm just going to select both of them and just vertically align their bottom and make sure that they're exactly equal to each other in position now. I think they can both be moved up, so I'm just going to test that. That looking pretty good to me right now. Let's go and get this piece and it goes in here. I am going to place it, then I'm going to zoom in and see how well it's placed. Well, the answer to that is not very well at all, but I can just fix that. Hold the Spacebar, go and check this end looks pretty good. Control+0 to zoom back out again. Now, let's go and move in the last piece here, which is this one here. I need to move it so it's in position and it needs to be just here. Again, I'm going to zoom in to make sure it's perfectly aligned, which it isn't. Now that I've done this, I'm going to have a look and see if I've got enough for my pattern piece. What I want is a pattern piece that contains this space here, this white shape, this black shape, this black shape, and this white shape. I'm going to draw a square over here and I think I've got just the right amount of pattern pieces here. I'm going to choose View and then I'm going to choose Rulers and I'm going to choose Show Rulers, because I want to see my rulers. I actually want to pre-prepare some guides. To create a guide, you can just drag in off the ruler. I'm going to position one guide just here. I'm going to do the same thing and position this guide right along this edge here. Now I'm going to align them a little bit better in a minute, but for now, I just want them in position. Now I'm going to do the same thing here. I'm going to drag one down from the top, and I'm going to align it to the very top of this black object here, which is also the very top of this white object and I'm going to do the same here. Align to the top of the black and the top of the white. Now, in here is an entire pattern piece and that's what I'm looking for. I just need to make sure that it's perfectly aligned before I go any further so let's get the Zoom tool. Let's just zoom in here and make sure that the guides are in the right position, which they seem to be. Certainly had a lot more luck with my guides this time than the first time I created this shape. Well, this guide is not right here. Now, guides are just elements. They are just objects in Illustrator. You'll see here, that a guide is an object. You can just select it with the Selection tool and just move it into position. Now I'm going to press Control or Command+0 to zoom back out. What I want to do now is to create a rectangle that is lined up with this set of guides. I'm going to the Rectangle tool. I'm just going to click here on this guide here, and drag out a rectangle. Now I need to make sure that it's correctly aligned so let's just go in here and make sure that the rectangle is aligned correctly. Now, if you want to, you can lock everything else down, so that it's just a little bit easier to work with this. I'm just going to lock all these pieces down because I don't want the pieces to move, but I do want this rectangle to move. I want to line it up perfectly. It's a little bit out down the side here and it's a lot out of the bottom. That's looking really good. I'll press Control or Command+0. Now I have my rectangle selected. You can see it over here in the Layers palette and it has no stroke and no fill. Now this is critical for creating patterns. I don't know why patterns work this way. I don't understand the theory behind it. But I do know that there are certain steps that if you take your patterns work, if you don't do that, your patterns don't work. What we need to do is to create a rectangle with no stroke, no fill, that is the exact size of the element that we want to use for our pattern piece. That's rule number 1. Rule number 2 is, it needs to be at the back of everything. I'm just going to unlock everything now that I've created it and drag this rectangle all the way down to the very bottom here so it's behind all the pieces that I want to use. Now, I don't need the guides anymore, so I'm going to click and then Shift click on the last to the guides and I'm just going to drag them into the trash can because right now they're pretty much in the way of everything. Now I have only shapes and my rectangle here. I don't actually need this shape here. It's not technically needed for my pattern, so I can just click it and delete it. I can either delete it from the last palette or I can just press the Delete key. I've just deleted that shape. Now what I've got left is only the pieces of the patterns that I want to create and the rectangle. I'm going to click on the entire layer. I'm just going to click this icon here. Everything is selected with the rectangle that is marking out the size of my pattern piece behind everything. Now what I do, is I open the Swatches panel and I just drag from the middle of this rectangle, drag and drop this into the Swatches panel. That creates a swatch. Basically, that's all we have to do to create the swatch but let's see how we would go ahead and use it. I'm just going to zoom out here. Let's create a new artboard for this. I'm just clicking the Artboard object. Just going to drag out a shape here and I'm going to drag out a rectangle the size of the artboard, just so that we can fill it with our pattern, because we need to do a little bit more work when we actually go ahead and use this pattern. You can see that the rectangle I've created, this black filled. In fact, I want to fill it with my pattern so I'm just going to click here on the pattern and now the rectangle is filled with a herringbone pattern. But to look like a real herringbone, we'd like to rotate it. With the objects selected, this rectangle selected, I'm going to choose Object, Transform, Rotate. Now, what's happened here is that the object has rotated. We don't want the object to rotate, so I'm going to de-select this checkmark here. But we do want to transform the pattern and we want to transform it minus 45 degrees. Now, yours won't say minus 45 degrees. It's just that I've already been in here to create the pattern already in this document which is why I've already got one. But you just set it to minus 45 degrees and that will rotate it and click Okay. Then if you want to re-size it you do just exactly the same as you would with a pattern that's made with the pattern make tool. You choose Object, Transform, Scale. You'll deselect transform objects because we don't want to transform the rectangle itself. We just want to scale down or scale up the size of our herringbone pattern. I'm just going to make it, a whole lot smaller. I'm just using the down arrow key, but you could actually type a value in there. Then just click Okay. Of course you want to make sure that transform patterns is what's selected because that's what you are transforming. There you have the answer to the question of how do I create a repeating pattern in Illustrator if I'm not using Illustrator CS6 or later? If you're using CS5, 5.1, CS4 or any earlier version, you're going to need to create your pattern manually and this is how you do it. Thank you very much to the person who asked me the question because it's something I've been meaning to do for a long time, is to actually make a video for making patterns in earlier versions of Illustrator, so you prompted me to do it. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
