Transcripts
1. Watercolor Stripe Pattern in Illustrator - Introduction: Hello. I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Create Watercolor Stripe Seamless Repeating Patterns 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. Today we're looking at creating an organic pattern. It's a pattern that has a hand-created feel to it and it's going to be watercolor stripes. We're going to be using some downloaded watercolor brushes. I'm going to explain to you why I chose those brushes so that you can make the right choices when you're looking to create your own patterns too. We're going to do this in Illustrator CC using the new Puppet Warp Tool, and we're also going to be doing it for earlier versions of Illustrators. We're going to split at one stage into videos for people who have access to Puppet Warp and videos for people who do not. Now as you're watching these videos, you're going to see a prompt which asks if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you are enjoying the class, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes that you would recommend it to others, and secondly, write even in just a few words, why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations really help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you see the follow link on the screen, click it to keep up to date with new classes as they're released. Of course, as always, if you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started making watercolor striped patterns in Illustrator.
2. Pt 1 Get the Watercolor assets: To create our watercolors stripe pattern, we're going to need some asset; so watercolor assets to use. I've been using this watercolor brushes set for a while and I really like it, and it works really well for this particular project. So I encourage you to download it. I'll give you the download link for it. You'll come to this page and click on "Download them". That's going to download this free watercolor brushes zip file. Allow yourself plenty of time to do that because it is quite a large file. Once it's downloaded, you'll go to your downloads folder or wherever you downloaded the file into. I downloaded it into the working folder that I'm working on. It downloads as a zip file. On a Mac, it's probably going to be already expanded for you into a folder. On a PC, you'll just need to double-click to open it and then choose to "Extract all files". Now, I've already done that. Inside the folder that it extracts into, you'll find the rights usage terms, and also the watercolor brushes ai file. That's the one that you need to open in Illustrator. That's where we're going to start in Illustrator with this watercolor brushes file open and ready to go.
3. Pt 2 Set up the document: I've gone ahead and opened illustrator and opened the watercolor brushes file. There is nothing on this art board and that is to be expected because the file contains watercolor brushes and here are the brushes in the brushes panels. So you'll want to open up the brushes panel. If you don't see yours, you'll choose window and then brushes. Now there are a lot of brushes in this file making it a very large file. So the first thing I suggest that you do is get rid of anything that you don't want. Because we're going to be creating a solid stripe, we don't want anything like this where the stripe is pattering out so we can safely get rid of that. So you'll just go through and select the brushes, click on one brush to delete. If you need to select others at the same time, you can hold the Control or Command K and delete more of those brushes. So am just going to select the ones that are obviously not going to work for me at all. So anything with bumps in it, is not going to work. Anything with too big a color variation is not going to work. This one's got way too many lumpy bits on it. These are ideal. There's nice stripe brushes because they're going to work really well for the effect. This one's got too much happening at the end. Really you probably only want to end up with half a dozen brushes anyway. I'm just going through to show you the kind of ones that I would keep and the ones that I would remove. So once you've got the ones you want to remove this, hit the delete icon here and click yes. And then you can go back and just have another look and say if there's anything else that you would want to delete. If you want thin stripes, you may want to keep some of those thinner ones. If you just want thick stripes, then just keep the thick ones. I'm just going to grab a few more to delete. What we're doing at this stage is just getting rid of some excess size in our file because we don't want a lot of size because we're going to be making quite a complex pattern. Once you've done this, we're going to save this as a brushes set that we can use in any document cause I don't want to be working in this document. So to do that, I'll click the fly out menu, choose Save Brush Library. This opens up the location where the brushes should be stored in your version of Illustrator. I'm going to call this pattern watercolor brushes, just so it's easy to identify, and I'll click Save. So that rather large file of watercolor brushes has now been saved. So I can close this downloaded file. I'm not going to save it because I got rid of some brushes from it that someday in the future, I might want for a different project. So at this stage, I'm just going to discard it so that the changes will not be saved. And so that brushes file is still full of all the brushes that I downloaded just in case I want to use them later on. Now for a pattern , we're going to create a new file. So I'll click Create New. I'll use a 2000 by 2000 pixel file so you can set up your size. You want to start at a fairly large size. I am using a RGB color mode. I'll click Create. I need to open up the brushes that I just saved so I'll open my brushes panel, click the fly out menu, choose Open Brush Library, User Defined, and select the pattern watercolor brushes. We won't need all of these brushes, so we'll just select the ones that we do want and move them across here into the brushes panel. So what I'm looking for, are the thicker brushes that are fairly even in width and fairly even in color. So at this point, I don't want to do a lot of color work. This one is another one that we could use. If you want some thinner stripes, then you could go and drag out some thinner brushes. So I might grab a few of those as well. So let's call that good. We'll click here to close this panel because we don't want those brushes to be still in the computer's memory because this is going to be a fairly memory intensive process anyway. I'll zoom out and I'll drag a line from just above the top of the art board to just below it. Hold the Shift key as I do that so it's constrained to a vertical direction and I'll click to apply a brush to it. Now the reason why we've applied the brush to a line that goes beyond the art board is that we don't want these little angular bits to be part of our stripe. So we're going to get rid of those in just a minute. You will say that because we've applied a fat brush to a really long line, the brushes been stretched somewhat. We can make it thicker by clicking here on options as selected object and simply increasing the width of the brush. So we get the stripes that we want and we want to do that before we go any further, I'll click Okay. Then the next step is to expand this. So instead of a line that has a brush applied to it, we're going to expand this into all other little component shapes that came with that watercolor brush. We will choose Object, Expand Appearance. Let's have a look in the Layers palette, which I've just temporarily lost and see what we've got. We have a group and inside the group here are a whole lot of little paths and these are the little shapes that go together to make our brush. So we'll want to burst them out of the group. So select your group and choose object Ungroup. So right now we're just working with a whole series of shapes. To crop this, we need to go and create a rectangle that is the size of our crop. So it needs to be 2000 pixels tall. So I'll type in 2000 as its height, and its width just needs to be large enough to cover up the whole of this brush. So a couple of 100 pixels will be just fine. I'll click Okay. So there's my rectangle. It needs to be aligned to the art board. So I'll just click here to align it to the art board. I've got aligned to art board already enabled, but you might need to set that if yours doesn't jump into position. There's also an aligned panel and you can choose Show Options and get the align to our board option there. So we just want to make sure that the top of this shape is aligned to the art board because it's 2000 pixels tall. The bottom is going to be automatically aligned to the bottom. You'll select over the rectangle and the brush and go to the Pathfinder palette. The Pathfinder palette here is a crop option, so you'll click crop, and that will crop away the excess elements from the brush shape and leave only the elements that actually fit inside the art board. At this point, if your computer is slowing down, you want to go and close down everything that you are not currently using to give your computer plenty of memory to work with that, cropping sometimes will take quite a bit of memory. So now we've got a group again Because that's what happens when you do a crop. We've also got some bits down here. If you check them, the very, very bottom, you will quite often find what are no fill knows stroke shapes. You can tell that they're going to be that by the looks of them. And when you click on them and select them, there's no fill, no stroke here. So what we're going to do is wind back until we get to the first of them. For some reason they quite handily, they get dumped at the bottom. So as soon as you say the first of these selected check it is no fill, no stroke which it is. So each and everything below it can be removed. So I'll hold the Shift key as I click on the last one and then just pick them up and drop them into the trash can. That just gets rid of things that are of no use at all. They weren't doing anything. So why even have them in your brush. Particularly if the memory on your computer is a little bit lacking, you want to give your a computer everything it can possibly work with. So I'm going to select this group and I'm going to ungroup as well, object Ungroup. So right now we're working exactly the same regardless of what version of Illustrator we are working in. We've got our first strike, but it's not a repeating pattern. If we were to create this, the strike would be really, really obvious where it began and ended in its not a pattern yet. So in the next video we're going to get started working on that. We're going to stay with all versions of illustrators still for a little bit longer. Then we're going to split into those people who have access to the new Puppet Warp Tool. And you can tell if you've got the Puppet Warp Tool because it looks like a little push pin over here and it shares a toolbar position with the Free Transform tool. So you might take a quick look and work out if you've got the Puppet Warp Tool or not. If you have, you know that you are going for the videos that use that. If you haven't, then go for the videos where we're dealing with the fact that you don't have it and we'll use another technique instead.
4. Pt 3 Cut the stroke in half: To make this into a seamless repeating pattern, we're going to take advantage of the fact that we have got something that seamless in the middle here. We're going to divide it into and move the bottom half to the top and the top half or the bottom. That's going to be halfway through the process of making this a seamless stripe. To do this, I'm going to drag out a line. So I'm just going to drag out a horizontal line holding the Shift key as I do it. I want to position this at exactly 1,000 pixels in the y value. That means that it's 1,000 pixels from the top of the document. The documents is 2,000 by 2,000, so it's dead across the middle. Then we'll use a tool to use this as a dividing line. To do that you just select the line, nothing else. The line has to be on top of whatever it is that you want to divide. You'll choose object and then path, and then choose divide objects below. What that does is it cuts any object below that is on that path exactly in half. Now let's choose View and then Rollers and let's choose Show Rulers. Because this is going to make it a little bit easier for me to say when I drag out my selection, I'll go to the Selection tool, and I need to drag out a selection that comes all the way down to the 1,000 position. I am just reading that off the guide at the side here. Once I've got that selected, I've got all the elements that are in the top half, the top 1,000 pixels. You should say here that your selection midpoint is at 500. If you check the bottom point, it would be at a 1,000. That tells you that you've got your selection exactly right. Let's group these objects. So choose object group just before they start walking in funny directions, and let's move them down. So we'll choose object and then transform move. We'll move them zero pixels horizontally because we don't want to adjust the horizontal movement, but we do want to move them to the bottom here. I will go vertically, 1,000. They're going to appear immediately over the top of the previous set that was underneath there, and we'll just click okay. We've got this group here you can set selected, will lock it down and we'll turn it off because that means that everything else that's visible here belongs to the bottom half of the document, will select either what's left here and move it up. So we'll choose object transform and then move again zero pixels horizontal movement. In this case, we want to go minus 1,000 vertically. It's taken up to the very top of the art board click okay. Now let's make visible again the pace at the bottom here and unlock it. So ultimately, when we create a patent, the join will happen between this pace and this pace. We know it's going to be a perfect join because we made it by cutting things in half. So if you cut things in half and put them again, back together again, they're going to form a perfect join where it's not perfect is here just in the middle. This is where we have to do a bit of fancy footwork. So in the next video, we're going to see how we could make this a seamless transition, or at least begin to make it as seamless transition using the Pop up warp tool. If you don't have the Pop up warp tool, and you're going to skip to the video. After that, I'm going to show you another technique for getting this transition to be right or better. Then we'll come back and make the transition even better but that will be everybody looking at that solution.
5. Pt 4 Creating an overlap with the Puppet Warp tool: I'm assuming that if you're watching this particular video, you're using a version of Illustrator that has the Puppet Warp tool available, because you're going to need that. We've got a group already. I've got the bottom part of this illustration as a group. So I'm going to select over the top part and let's make that a group with object group to just make life a little bit easier for now. I'll re-display this two options. To use Puppet Warp, the process of using it is that you'll click on the tool and then you're going to add pins to your shape. So I'm going to select the group that we will be working on and then I'm going to start putting pins in. The pins are used to do two things. One is that they'll hold things still and the other thing is that they'll move them. It just depends on how you use the pin as to what it's going to do. So first of all, we need to make sure that nothing down the bottom-end of this shape is going to move because this is a perfect match for what's up at the top. If we start moving things around, then we're going to miss match when we create this as a pattern. So we're going to start by putting in some pins here. So I'm going to zoom in and make sure that we have plenty of pins in place. So I've got a pin here and a pin here. I'm just going to add quite a few pins just to jam this bottom-end of the shape down. Then, I will go back up to the top part of the shape where we really want to make some movement and I'll add some more pins. So I might add one on the way up, couple on the way up maybe, and then we'll start adding a couple of pins here. Once you've added pins, you can use them to move. So I'm going to select this pin, you can see it's got a circle around it, it's the active pin, and I can just drag to move it. I can drag this one to move it up. What I'm going to be looking to do is to create a more seamless transition between these two elements, the one at the bottom and the one at the top. I'm going to do that by creating some an overlap. The overlap is really going to help me when I adjust for color. So let's just drag this up and see how we're going? I'll zoom back out because I want to see how it's looking overall. Because we pinned the bottom down so heavily it wouldn't have moved, the top has moved. I think that's looking pretty good. All I need to do now is just click away from it. We can see that we've now got a overlap that's working a whole lot better than it was previously. So this is what we're going to use the Puppet Warp tool to do, which is to create that overlap a little bit more easily than we would be able to do in other versions of Illustrator. So we've got a fairly smooth transition here. The only problem is that the transition, color-wise, isn't working. We've got a definite line here, but you can see that the edges of the brush are looking really good. So we're in a really good position to go forward and to fix up the color issues. So if you are able to use the Puppet Warp tool, you're now ready to go ahead and do the color fix. So you'll skip the very next video, and then go on with the one immediately after that. In the next video, I'm going to deal with the warping that we're going to need to do if we don't have the Puppet Warp tool available to us.
6. Pt 5 Creating an overlap with Envelope Warp: If you don't have the "Puppet Warp" tool available to you, you're going to need to use a different tool to join these two pieces up. What we need to be careful of is that we don't do anything that's going to affect the bottom half of this shape because this bit here is the seamless join for this piece up here. The bit that we need to fix is the bit in the middle and we need to do that without making any adjustments to the end of this shape. We're just going to pick one shape to work with, not both, and I'm going to pick this one. Let's work out what we're working with. Well, this is the piece that we're working with this group and all the rest of the objects are not in a group yet. Let me just lock this group down and turn it off, so we can say what's left. Let's grab everything else and let's group that with object group. That just tucks that away neatly, we'll lock it down because we don't want to move it. Let's make visible the bit that we are going to be working with and let's unlock that. Now, the tool that we're going to use, the tool that's available to us to work with this particular shape is what's called the "Mesh" tool. We'll target the group of shapes and choose object and then "Envelope Distort" and "Make with Mesh." Now when we "Make with Mesh," we get to set a number of rows and columns, and it's the rows and columns that allow us to make adjustments. Now typically, the default settings are really quite small numbers, but we need to make sure that we don't touch the bottom here. That means that the more rows we have, the more we can move the top ones and the less likely we are to move the bottom ones. I'm going to set my rows to nine simply because I don't want to be touching the stuff at the bottom. Columns, three or four will be just fine. I'll probably just choose three. If I click "Preview," you'll see that this is the grid that we'll be working with and I'm wanting to protect down here and just give myself a little bit of room to move with the grid up the top, so I'll click "Okay." Let's zoom into the top part of this grid and with the direct selection tool, I'll select over the top points on this grid and I'm just going to drag up because I want an overlap. An overlap that I can work into blending these two pieces together. I'm just going to click away and see what that looks like, let's press "Control" or "Command 0" to zoom back out and see what it looks like. I'm not concerned with the color issues, we're going to deal with those in a minute. All I'm concerned with is that I have a fairly seamless transitions size-wise from one of these brush ends to the other and this is a pretty seamless transition, that's pretty consistently wide all the way down. I'm really happy with that, fairly simple process to go through. Let's go and re-select our "Envelope Warp" because over here you can see that we've got an envelope, we haven't got any content, we haven't got any access to anything right now except this envelope. Before we finish, we need to get access to the bits and pieces inside here to make our color change. What we'll do, is with this selected choose "Object" and then "Envelope Distort" and we'll choose "Expand." That just brings this back to a group exactly as it was before, except it's been stretched and it's been stretched to make this overlap that we can now do something with. If you don't have the "Puppet Warp" tool accessible to you, you do have the "Envelope Distort," "Make with Mesh," and that's what you're going to use to just stretch one part of the two split brushes over the top of the other so that you've got a reasonable overlap that we can do some color blending in, in the next video.
7. Pt 6 Smooth the Overlap: So regardless of whether you got to this point by using the Envelope Warp or whether you use the Puppet Warp, the next thing that you need to do is to smooth out this change. We've got two shapes here that are overlapping and the colors are just not matching. We've also got a fairly visible line through these spaces here. So what we'll do is identify which piece we're going to change. Let me just turn that off. Well, that's the bottom piece and that's the piece I am going to change. This is the top piece and I'm not going to change that saw. I'll lock it down, so I can't select it. I'll go to the group selection tool because that allows me to select within a group and just makes life a lot easier. Now there are a few options that we have here and I just wanted to step through each of them with you. One of them is to select an element here that is across this dividing line and just delete it. So what you are doing then is poking a hole through this bottom shape, so that you can see the shape underneath and doing that you'll be able to soften the edge somewhat. Now, at some stage when you use the group selection on a shape and delete it, you're going to end up with something like this where we've got a rough edge, and we don't want that to be the case so I'm going to undo that. Let's zoom in a little bit closer so we can see where we're working because there's a tool that's going to bail us out here if you like and it's a tool that we practically never used, because it's really most of the time pretty useless. It's called the knife tool. It shares a toolbar position here with the eraser. So go and grab a knife tool, because what it allows you to do is to draw through a shape and cut it. You just can't edit it after you've done it, it's whatever you get is whatever you get. So just draw a wiggly line through the shape, go back and get the group selection tool. You can see here now that we've divided this shape into two paces, allowing us to remove one but not destroy this edge and again, get this more softened effect. The other thing that you can do is to select a shape like this one here and then go to the eyedropper tool and target a color in the element above and we can recolor that pace. So again, with getting this sort of blend happening through the transition area by re-coloring this pace. So you'll want to work across this transition area, doing one of a number of things. Either select a pace and just remove it. So let me go here with the group selection tool and just delete this pace, that's one option or select on a pace and re-color it, so that you get this more seamless look across the transition or go and select the pace and if you can only select a really big pace, select it and then come to the knife tool and then just curve into it in a ragged manner. Come back to the group selection tool, grab the pace that you are able to curve off, and then just remove it, all the while trying to remove this line across this element that says we join two pieces together. You just want to smooth that out, however it is that you are able to do it. Now, I'm going to speed up the video as I go ahead and do just that and we'll come back once I've finished smoothing off this edge, using just those techniques that I suggested that you use. When you think you've got it just about right, you'll want to zoom back out a little bit and just check the transition as you zoom back out. There's always going to be some variety in watercolor elements. So you don't want to spend a whole heap of time on this, but you do want to spend enough time to get a reasonably good transition. Let's test and say how our pattern is going. So I'll zoom all the way back out with Control or Command zero. I'm going to draw a rectangle that is going to be the bounding box for the pattern. So I'll click once in the document, my document height or my art board height is 2,000 pixels. So I'm going to type that in as the height, and the width is just going to be the width of the strike plus a little bit extra I'm thinking probably about a 120 pixels, I'll click okay. I need to align this to the top of the artboard. So let's select aligned to artboard, let's click the top. So this 2,000 pixel high rectangle stretches from the top of the artboard to the bottom. It needs to be a no fill no stick rectangle and it needs to be behind everything for it to be a bounding box. So I'll choose arrange, send to back. Let's unlock the rest of the pattern and let's just move this across, I'll hold the Shift key as I do so that it moves in a perfectly horizontal direction. If I'm not a 100 percent sure that I haven't moved it, let's just reselect align to the top of the art board, just to make sure that it is aligned perfectly. We'll choose, Select All to select the bounding box and the two elements that make up our pattern pace, open up the swatch's panel and drag and drop it into the swatch's panel. To test our pattern will just drag out a rectangle, target the fill and click once on the pattern and the pattern is then applied to our rectangle. You can see if it needs any more work, if you're not happy with the transition point, then you could go back and do a bit more work on it. If you are happy with the transition point, then you have your pattern. Now, you're going to say this transition point a little bit more obviously, if you have just a single stripe. But if you add multiple stripes into this pattern and if you offset the transition points a little bit, then you're going to have it as being less obvious. I'm going to go ahead in the next video and just show you how you would create some offset once, so that the transition point was in different places, making it a little less obvious as to where you actually made that transition point.
8. Pt 7 Add more stripes: To create a pattern that has multiple stripes in it which are different, we first select either this shape and just remove it and from the objects that I still have available, I'm also going to remove the [inaudible] stripe rectangle because I don't need that any longer. I'll select the objects that are left here and I'll group them together just so that I can talk them away and I'll call this first stripe. I'll also lock it down so it's not accessible. Let's zoom out and we'll create a line for our second stripe. So I'll just hold the Shift key as I drag out a stripe that extends beyond the art board go to the brush tool and we'll select a different brush stroke this time, let's select this one here. Again, we want to make sure that it's a little bit wider. So we'll try to sort of match up the width on this too, and I'll click okay. I'm going to expand the appearance with object, Expand Appearance. Now we're going to crop the edges off. So we'll create a rectangle that is 2000 pixels high, which is the height of the art board and a width of something like 200 pixels would be fine. I'm going to give this rectangle a stripe just so that we can say it, and we're using that as a cropping guide. So it doesn't matter that it does have a strike on it. Let's move it over our shape and then let's choose align to art board and make sure that the top of it is aligned to the top of the art board. Now we'll select either the line and the rectangle and to crop using it will go to the Pathfinder and click crop. Now that that's done, let's just open up our group and see if we have any little bits left over, so we go down to the bottom of the group and safe, we've got lines while we do so we're just going to wind back until we get the first of those lines. Once we find the first of them will select it, drag down to the very bottom. Hold the Shift key as you click on the last one and just click the trashcan and that removes all those excess lines so they don't get in our way. Now everything is inside a group, so we're going to break them out of the group by selecting the group and choose object and group. To divide it this time, instead of creating a line across the middle, we're going to create the line offset so that the patch job is going to be slightly offset. So for this, I'm going to choose about a quarter of the way through the document. So I'll just drag out a horizontal line and then adjust its middle so it's at 500 pixels. So that means there's 500 pixels here and 1,500 here. With the line selected, we're going to use it to cut these elements. So we'll choose object and then path, divide objects below. Now we will be able to go and select the elements at the top. I'll drag either of these elements to select them. Now I need to make sure that I get them. So let's just do that. I'm just going to press Delete to make sure I've got them which I have, so press control or command just to bring them back. You may want to just do that to make sure that you don't have any stragglers not included in the selection. I'll choose object groups so that they're all grouped together. Now we'll move them down the art board and we're going to move them down to the very bottom here. So I'll choose object transform and then move and we're going to move them 1500 pixels vertically and 0 pixels horizontally. So that's type 0 in here and 1500 in the vertical movement. So they're aligned to the bottom of the art board and we'll click okay, so now I can turn off that group and just lock it down. Now let's select the remaining objects, we'll group them with object group and then we'll move them up with object transform move and we're going to move them in minus 500 pixels. That's going to take them to the top of the document, zero pixels horizontally and just click on okay. So then now in position, let's return the other elements here. Now you're going to use whatever tool you have accessible to you to smooth out this join. Because I'm using Illustrator, I'm going to use the Puppet Warp tool, I'll go and select the bottom most shape here, go to the Puppet Warp tool and we're just going to lock down the very bottom of this shape, so it's not going to move under any circumstances. I'll add a few more pins going up to the top and then add two pins in at the top. I'll zoom in so I can say where I'm working and with my pin selected, I'm going to start moving these out and up so that I can create this same [inaudible] join. The last time I did it, I didn't do a huge overlap this time I'm going to add a little bit more of an overlap. I can add a pin in here, if I need to just to be able to stretch this area out at another pin in here. So I can stretch this one out here. Let's roll down a bit. I think we're going to have to stretch this out to look a bit balance. So just going to widen this out here. Let's go and say what it looks like. I'll zoom back out. We're just looking at this area to say how the transition looks. It's looking pretty good. So let's zoom into this and we're going back now to the group selection tool. We're going to start selecting elements here just to start removing them and start blending this paces together at this point. Using the features that we have available for re-coloring, as well as just for selecting and deleting some of the elements from this overlapping area to try and remove the obvious impression that what we've done here is to join two pieces together. When you've pretty much smoothed out that area, let's go and create a pattern from this. I'll just select either of these two elements and I'm going to group them together into a single group so the stripe can be easily selected and moved. I'm going to move this one a little bit closer to the previous one, just make sure that they're all aligned to the top of the art board. So just selecting both of them and making sure we're working on a line to art board. Make sure that they're set to align perfectly at the top of the art board. Now we'll add an [inaudible] rectangle. Again, making sure that this is the size of the art board or the height of the art board at 2000 pixels tall. I'll give it no fill and no stroke. We'll move it behind everything with object arrange and then send to back, I need to make sure that the gap here plus the gap here is approximately equal to the gap there. It's not. So I'm going to bring this side in a little bit and probably bring this in just a little bit as well. I'll select everything with select all open up the swatches panel and drag and drop everything into the swatches panel. Now we'll create a rectangle so that we can test out this new element and just scale it down to about 60 percent so that we can see the final result. Because we offset the join this time we're not getting that line through our pattern and the more elements we add to this and the more way offset add, join, the less repetitive it's going to look.
9. Pt 8 Double up the stripes and recolor your pattern: I've gone ahead and created a third stripe and for this one, I offset the line again, so I used to a line through here. We've got one cut through the middle, one through the top, and one through the bottom here. Now, we've got three stripes here. We could easily make those six. Let me just zoom out and show you how you would do that. We'll select over all three of these stripes which I've grouped together so that they're all neat and tidy. I'll alter option drag a group of them away. Now I have six stripes, but these I'm going to rotate, so I'll just hold my mouse outside the top corner, hold the Shift K, and rotate this around 180 degrees. Now, I'll select over all of these and just make sure that they're all aligned to the top of the art board. I'll create my no fill, no strike rectangle by dragging over all of these shapes. Now my no fill, no strike rectangle has to be 2,000 pixels tall. It can be as wide as it needs to be. I'm going to make sure that it's aligned to the top of the art board, has no fill and no stroke and Object, Arrange, Send to back so it's behind everything. The only thing I need to do now is to eyeball this distance here plus this distance here and make sure it's going to be approximately equal to the distance between the individual shapes. Now if I think that I'm not quite right here, let me just zoom in and select either this path. I'm just going to bring it in slightly. I think that's looking pretty good. I'll just grab everything and drag and drop it into the swatches panel. Let's test out our new pattern. Create a rectangle, target the fill and click on our pattern. I'll resize it so we can see the joins and make sure that they look pretty smooth, Object, Transform, Scale. I'll scale it down to 60 percent. I don't want to transform the objects, I just want to transform the pattern and I'll click "Okay". This time we have a set of stripes and it's made with alternating joins and because we've rotated the stripes to create additional ones, we've got a way more organic striped pattern. Of course we can recolor this so I'm going to select the shape with the pattern in it. I'll click here on the "Re-color Artwork Tool". There are a lot of colors in this pattern, so we'll go straight to the edit option. I'm going to lock everything down because as I drag around, I want all the colors to change in relation to each other. I'll just grab one of these colors and let's go and create them as a different watercolor pattern. You can go through and select any of the colors in the color wheel to create a watercolor pattern that is a totally different set of colors. With just one set of pattern swatches, even though you've taken quite a bit of time and effort in making them, you can easily create multiple pattern swatches from that one set. I'm going to click "Okay" because I'm going to select this color and of course, what happens whenever we re-color a pattern that way is that we still got our original in the swatches panel and we've got our new pattern as well. Illustrator is creating multiple patterns for us every time we do a re-color option. It would of course be possible to color each of these differently too, and make a pattern out of them. You've got lots and lots of variations available to you using this process. Your project for this class is to create your own pattern of watercolor stripes. Download the set of brushes that I've found for you and go ahead and create a multi stripe pattern of watercolor stripes in Illustrator and post an image of your completed pattern as your class project. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and I hope you've learned things about Illustrator of which you were previously unaware. As you were watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which asked if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class and learned things from it, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes that you do recommend the class and secondly, write even 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 look on the screen and see the follow link, click it to keep up to date with new classes as they're released. As always, if you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
