Transcripts
1. Whimsical Diagonal Line Patterns in Illustrator - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, whimsical diagonal line 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. Now, this whimsical design class is suitable for anybody who's using Illustrator CS6 or CC, any of the CC versions. We're going to draw some diagonal lines and create them as seamless repeating patterns. You're going to see how to do this as a diagonal line pattern as well as a cross hatch pattern. We're going to draw some loopy lines as well. You could use these patterns in a number of ways, including for fabric design on a site like Spoonflower it and you can also create them as scrapbook papers. In fact, one of this we're going to create as whimsical style scrapbook paper. In this case, we're going to expand the pattern so that we can color elements in it. This class has a number of pattern-making skills in it, but we're going to try and create as many patterns as we can with the least amount of effort, which I always think is a great idea. If you're ready, let's get started making whimsical diagonal line seamless repeating patterns in Illustrator.
2. Pt 1 - Create your first diagonal line pattern: For the first of our diagonal line patterns, we're going to do something that is a whimsical but fairly subtle diagonal line. I'll choose File and then New and I'm just going to create a square document. I'm going to make mine 1200 by 1200 pixels in size. You can make yours any size that you like. I'm going to use the pencil tool and that shares a toolbar position here with the shaper tool. I'm going to select the pencil tool and then double-click on it so I can check its settings. What I want to do is make sure that this fidelity option is right across to the smooth area. I'm using a mouse and I'm going to get a better result if I use a smooth or semi smooth line. I'll just click "Okay" and then I'll draw a rough diagonal line. I want my line to be a bit wavy. Now if that's not the line that you want, you can just undo it. Think I'm going to wind back my smooth setting and try for something a little less straight. Let's call this our diagonal line. I am going to increase the stroke weight on it to whatever weight it is that I want my line to be. I'm thinking probably about 22 pixels. With it selected, I'll choose object and then pattern make. I'll click "Okay" now you won't have this pattern make tool, unfortunately, if you're using Illustrator CS5 or earlier as it was only introduced in Illustrator CS6, and of course it's available in CC. What we've got on the screen right now is just a grid pattern. That's the pattern that I want. But we need to start joining things up and that's going to be a little tricky. What you'll do is go down to this copies area and you probably want something like 3 by 3 or 5 by 5. You want to see a fair bit of your pattern on the screen. But you also want is to select dim copies to and then reduce your copies to around 50 percent because you want to see what the actual piece that you have some control over is, and that's this piece here that's black. All the others I can't select, I can't edit them, I can't do anything with them, but they are really important from a reference point of view. What I need to do now is to close things up a little bit. I'm probably going to select this option so I can scale down the width and height at the same time. I'll just start bringing them in because I want to get these lines pretty close to overlapping. Because of the line I drew, I draw it on a pretty good 45-degree angle and everything's lining up pretty well, but not well enough for a pattern. Because when I turn this off, you can see my patents got distinct joins in it. I'm going to re-select to dim my copies and I'm going to zoom into this line. I want to zoom in to the point at which this line has to meet up with this part of the line. I'm going to the direct selection tool. Now the only line I can affect is this black one. I'm going to this anchor point and what I have to do is move it as close and as well lined up to this gray line as I can because I want a seamless join. I'm just going to start trying to pull it into position. I need to get the anchor point in position. I also need to get the angle of the line so it doesn't have a sharp intersection. I've got it reasonably well lined up, but it's not perfect. It's far from perfect at this stage. I'm going to zoom back out. Now, the other part of the line that I can impact is down here, because this bit, is this bit. It might be a bit confusing, but you've got two points on the line that you can affect. This one up here and this one down here. If you're affecting this, it is an actual fact, this point up here. I'm going to zoom in down here because I may have a better chance of making things work if I come in and try and adjust this anchor point. I'm just trying to move it a little bit around to say, if I can get it to line up perfectly. By adjusting these values one pixel at a time, I can get pretty close to having this looking good. It's not there yet, but it's pretty close. I'm going to need to adjust this handle it a little bit because I've got a split here. I won't have that split if the two lines are perfectly aligned. Then again, need to drop it down a little bit so I need to see how far I have to move it. Well, just one pixel was sufficient to adjust the values in these boxes. All I'm doing is clicking in the box and pressing the up arrow or the down arrow and that just adjusts the line by one pixel. Quite often that's all you need to do. But sometimes you might have to adjust it by an even smaller value. But right now I've got a really good seamless pattern there though. Pattern is joined up perfectly. I can't say the same when I turn off dim copies. Everything is looking really good. If I'm happy with that at this stage, I can click done. Now I have a pattern page that I can use. I'll make a rectangle that's 1200 by 1200 pixels in size. Then I'll align it to the art board. I want it to be aligned perfectly over the art board. Now you can do that manually or you can go to the align options. I've got the align options over here. Make sure I'm selecting aligned to art board and then just centered over the art board. Of course, I don't want it to have a stroke and the fill is going to be the pattern that I just created now to make it smaller. Object transform scale will reduce the scale to about 50 percent. But of course, we don't want to reduce the object itself. We just want to reduce the patterns. I'll turn that off, turn preview on and just check the result and click "Okay." There's the first of our whimsical diagonal line patterns created using the pattern make tool here in Illustrator.
3. Pt 2 - Turn one pattern into many: Now that we've made our first pattern, there's a very easy way of making a pattern that is a little bit closer together so that we've got more lines. To do that first of all, I'm going to make a duplicate of the pattern that I've already created. Because I don't want to lose this one, but I would like to make a second version of the line, but using this one as the basis for it. I'll now double-click on this to open up the pattern make dialog, with this pattern visible. Again, I'm going to dim copies because it's really important for me right now to see what's going on. I need to grab this piece. With the selection tool, I'm going to grab this piece here and I'll hold the Alt or Option key as I just drag it across. I'm going to put it roughly in the middle of where those two lines were. I've managed to make a more intense pattern. Now it's very obvious that this is a copy and we were getting this bend in the line happening at the same place on two adjacent lines. Well, what we could do to solve that is to take this piece and just rotate it 180 degrees. If you hold the Shift key as you rotate it, it will come around to a perfect 180 degree rotation. When I let go of that, it's joining perfectly because these ends are just set to join perfectly. That's the way we designed it. We will be able to rotate it to get a different look for our line. Now, I like that, so I'm going to click done. That's given me another pattern, but I could also continue to work on this pattern. For this, I'm going to again drop it onto the new icon, so I've got a duplicate. I've got my original line, let me just grab this rectangles. This is the original pattern and this is the new pattern. We've got another copy of the new pattern which we're now going to do something with. I'll double-click on it and again that opens it up in the pattern make tool. Now I'm going to select over this line here. I'm going to double click on the pencil tool because I want to set something on. I want to set this Keep Selected on. That will allow me to continue to work on this line, but keep it selected so I can have multiple hits at it. I also want to be able to edit selected parts, so you want that selected as well. Just click, "OK". Now with the pencil tool, you can pick up this line at any point and just draw it a little bit differently and come back onto the line so it all joins up. Provided you don't attack this anchor point and this anchor point, everything's going to be just fine. The line is going to continue to join up at either end and you're going to get the ability to re-structure the lines live in this pattern dialogue. I've got this one looking pretty good. I'm going to work on this one, so I've got it selected and now I'm just going to come in and make some changes to it. But notice that I'm staying well away from this anchor point here and well away from this anchor point. That's crucial because if you try and adjust those anchor points, you're going to break your pattern. We've spent so much time just getting it right in the first place. Because I've got Keep Selected enabled, I can just keep working on this line until I get what I want. I'm going to call that good and again, click, "Done". That's giving us another pattern that we can work with. But I'm going to make another duplicate because I'm not finished. I'll double-click on this. Now, I've got two lines here that are very different. I'm going to grab this one and I'm going to Alt or Option drag another one away. I'm going to rotate this around 180 degrees. I do that by holding Shift as I do the rotation. I'm going to do the same with this one. Alt or Option, drag a duplicate away and then rotate it to 180 degrees holding the Shift key. Now I'm just going to rearrange this. Provided I'm careful as I drag them around, they're going to continue to form this seamless repeating pattern because that was how they were set up and they're just going to work perfectly. I'm just looking to arrange the lines as I want them to bend if I need to. I could also just come in and adjust the line if I wanted to do so. If the repeat was patched a little bit too obvious. When I'm done, I'll just click, "Done". Now we've got a whole series of patterns. We've got our original line which we took the trouble to join up once we'd made that joined up line then we were able to duplicate it and rotate it to create a different line. Then we were just able to make more and more duplicates. Again, not having to do any of the joining work. It's pays to make a really good job on that joined to begin with, because you can then use these lines to make a whole lot of additional patterns.
4. Pt 3 - Turn Diagonal Lines into a Crosshatch Pattern: We're back here with the same set of patterns because there are still some more that we can get out of these lines that were taken all the trouble to join perfectly. I'm going for the very last of this pattern, so I'll drag it onto the new icons. I can keep the original, but I want to edit this version, so I'm double-clicking on it. So we've got our four lines here. I'm going to select either the four lines and I'm going to reduce the line weight on them because I want some skinnier lines. So I've reduced them here to about 10 pixels. Now I also want to make a duplicate of them in play, so I'll choose "Edit copy" and then "Edit paste" in place. Now I've got my set of four lines on top of another set of identical four lines and what I want to do is make a crisscross pattern. So you may be tempted to rotate this 90 degrees. So let's rotate them 90 degrees, holding down the "Shift key" and when I let go, you can see that the pattern has broken. So I'm just going to undo that because it's halfway through the solution, but not the whole way. So with these four lines still selected, let's try a different approach. I'm going to choose object transform and then reflect, and this time I'm going to reflect them across the vertical and so what I end up with was what I wanted, and I got these perfect joints working in both directions, so my lines are now forming a crisscross pattern. I don't have to copy because I've already got my lines that are just click "OK" and I'll click "Away". Now if you're not happy with your lines at this point, this is something that you can do. I'm not happy with the bend in this line, so I'm going to re-select the line and I'm going back to my pencil tool and I can just redraw this line. I can also grab a line such as this one here, and I could rotate it now through 180 degrees because it will rotate through 180 degrees once it's been created correctly. Now, if I don't like that and I still don't, I can just redraw it. So I'm just looking for my pattern to be a little bit more even if you like and not to be with these very small areas and the very large areas. But again, I don't have to do any of the joints and the pencil tool is allowing me to quite easily redraw these lines. So when I've got what I want, I've got the beautiful wiggle here, I just want to get rid of and I can get rid of that with the pencil tool, but I could also use the smooth tool that would help me get rid of that wrinkle. Once I'm done, I'll just click "Done" and that again adds this as a pattern to my swatches panel. Let's fill our document with this pattern. Now, again, if you wanted to work on this pattern, if you weren't happy with it and didn't really want to save it as it is, then just simply double-click on it, don't make a duplicate of it, just double-click on it and now you can come back to working on this pattern and for this, you may want to go to the smooth tool. Provided you stay well away from the ends of the line, you'll be able to smooth the lines out a little bit and perhaps get rid of the bumps that you don't like and end up with a better cross pattern on your line. So with a smooth tool you just drawing over the line. Again, keeping away from those anchor points at the very end. So you don't want to ruin your line, but you may want to just smooth things out a little bit. When you're happy, just click "Done" and in this case you've just made a change to the pattern, you haven't actually created a brand new pattern. Now you can also work on colors. I'm going to make a duplicate of the pattern that I have so far, I'm going to "Double click" on the copy. So I'll go and pick up one of these lines, make sure that I've got the stroke targeted and I'm going to apply a different color to it. I need to make sure that when I do that, that the colors going all the way through the pattern, which it is, it's working correctly. So now I can go and choose different colors for my lines. I'm choosing a series of colors that are pinkish through to dark and then I'll go the other way, and so having recolor that pattern, I can now click "Done" and I'll have a new color set for that pattern. Now we've got a pattern recolored in a whole series of matching colors and because we've split those colors, we're also able to re-color our pattern using the recolor artwork tool. So I have this object selected with its pattern fill, I'm going to re-color artwork. All of these colors are mapped onto themselves, which is just fine. I need the little arrows between each of them. I'll click "Edit" I'm going to unlock this icon here so that the harmony colors are locked, and now when I drag around, you can see that the colors are all moving together, so I am getting shades of yellow, brown or shades of orange or shades of purple. Now it's also possible to unlink harmony colors once you've got something that you half like, unlink the harmony colors and then you could take one of these colors into a different area so you could bring in a different color should you wish to do so. When you're done, just click "OK" and you'll find that in the swatches panel, you have the original color set that you created and then this new pattern with a different color set. The recolor artwork tool works a little bit differently than coloring manually. When you use the recolor artwork, Illustrator automatically creates a new pattern swatch for you with the colors that you selected, but without destroying the one that you used to base it on.
5. Pt 4 - Loopy Line Patterns: For the next line that we're going to make, it's going to have little curls on it. I'm going back to my Pencil Tool and what I need to do is I need to make pairs of curls. For every one that is on this side of the line, I need one at the other side line. Now I haven't done that. I'm just going to show you quickly why this is not going to work. I'm going to make a duplicate of this line and line them up roughly how they're going to join. You see that I've got two loops on the same side of the line. I need to make them in pairs if this is going to be successful, if that's the look that you're going for. Again, I'm going to be hitting off in a 45-degree direction, and I'm going to be making my loops. Now if I'm relatively happy with that, I can start trying to make a pattern from it, except that this line is never going to join up with this line. This line needs to sort of come off at a 45-degree angle. I am going back to my Pencil tool with my line selected. I'm just going to redraw the end of the line. Now if I'm happy, I can go and make a pattern from an "Object", "Pattern", "Make". Again, we need to bring these lines in a little bit closer together. Now I've done a pretty good job of drawing this at one level, but on another level I haven't done a very good job at all. Lets just zoom out. Before I go to the trouble of joining all this lines together, what I'm going to do is show a fairly decent number of these lines. You can see that if this is not the look that I'm going for, that I've got loops here and then a big line and then more loops, then I'm not going to want to be joining these lines up at this stage because a pattern is just flawed from the outset. You will probably want to zoom out and just have a look at your pattern before you start trying to join it together and make sure that in actual fact, this is something that you want to join together. Because if you don't, don't waste the time on it at this stage. I'm going back into my pattern here and I'm going to lob some bits off. Now the Eraser Tool is a tool that you can typically use, but inside the pattern make tool, I can't get it to work. Instead of the eraser tool, I'm going to use something like a Scissor Tool. What I'm going to do is cut off this line. I'm looking at about the point at which I can cut it off and I'm thinking probably about there. That will give me two pieces and I'm going to remove the bit that I don't want. Again, I'm going to cut the end of this line down here to probably about there and again, delete the bits that I don't want. Now I can close it up a whole lot more. Once I've got it pretty much closed up, I'm going to zoom out and see what the result is. Again, I'll turn off Dim Copies because I want to get a sort of look at this pattern and see if it's looking better. It is looking better. It's probably still just a little bit long, but it's looking pretty good. I'm going to zoom in. I'll turn on Dim Copies again. If I want to take just a little bit more off, I can do so. Let me just zoom in so I can actually pick up the right part of this line to cut it off. Then select the bit that I don't want, get rid of it. Zoom back out and again, close up the gap just that little bit. I've got the lines nearly touching, of course they are not touching. I need to make sure that they are. Now at this point I'm coming back in and just doing that extra little bit of work to try and get them to line up perfectly. You've already seen how much work we're able to get out of a single design. We can get lots and lots of patterns out of a single design. It's really well worth your trouble to get a really good join on these lines so you can't see where the lines join. I've got one end of it looking good. I'm going to check the other end because I might be able to join them up more easily from this end. It's not quite perfectly joined, but let's try the other end again. Now up here, I'm just looking at how far this travels when I press the Up Arrow key. It's actually moving a full two pixels. It's going from 383 to 381. Well, I'm thinking that something a bit short of this value would be better. I'm going to try instead of 383.5, I'm going to try 383.25 and see if that's enough of a movement. Well, it's pretty close. I'm thinking I'm probably not going to be able to do much better than that, maybe a little bit. By making it 382, I was able to get just a little bit better of a joiner, certainly as well worth trying to get as good to join as you can, because that's going to impact the quality of your pattern later on. We've got a really good pattern piece here. I'm going to click "Done". Then we can again go and make a duplicate of it, double-click on it, and then perhaps add some extra elements to it. For example, I might want to make a duplicate here and get a more intense pattern. This one's got lots more lines in it. Just trying to find a good, happy place for that line. I can zoom out, turn off Dim Copies and just check and see how it's looking. I can also rotate this line. I can try it with a rotation of a 180 degrees, and I'm much, much happier with that. That's a much better result. Once I've done that, I'll just click "Done". We've got the original pattern that we made with this line, and then we've got the one that is doubly intense if you like. Let's go and make a rectangle. The size of the artboard. I'm going to square it up on the artboard, make sure that I'm focusing on the Fill and go and test my two patterns. I am going to use "Object", "Transform", "Scale", and just scale this pattern down to about 50 percent so we can see it a little bit more clearly. This is the more intense one. These patterns don't take a terribly long amount of time to make and they really do pack a punch you're not going to see a lot of people selling patterns like this because they're not as simple to make and they do take a little bit of skill, particularly in making those joins.
6. Pt 5 - Troubleshooting Drawing Diagonal Lines: So far in drawing the diagonal lines that I've been drawing, I've being ridiculously lucky in how well my 45-degree lines have gone. Now you may not be as lucky and I certainly not normally as lucky as this by any means. Let's go and see what you can do if your line isn't working particularly well. I'm going to start drawing. I'm going to do that for loop line. That's my full loop line and obviously it's taken off at an angle here. I'm just using the eraser tool to wipe off the very end. What I need is about this much space taken up with these two loops. I've got probably a bit more than I need. Now at this stage, I would obviously use the smooth tool and anything else that I needed to get a pretty good line here. Let's just hit this with the smooth torque because it looks pretty awful in these spots. Now it's not at a 45-degree angle, so I'm going to draw a line that is 45-degree angle. I'm just holding the Shift key as I draw out this line. I'm going to make it a different color just so it's going to be easier to see. Now I'm going to use it as a guide. What I want this line to do is to start and end and run along this 45 degree angle line. I'm just going to test it out here if you like. If I can get this line where I want it to join, to sit pretty much on that 45-degree line, I know that I've got a shape now that is running at around 45 degrees and it should be pretty easy to line up. So let's select it and let's choose object pattern make. Again, I'm going to lock these values and start bringing this in. Now, this is not going to join up however hard I try, so I'm going to get it to nearly join up stage and then unlock this and then start working on these values individually. I'm just going to try and put those two pieces roughly where they will overlap, and that's a pretty good overlap. Let's just turn on dim copies because we're going to use that as a guide to making sure that the overlap is good. Let's go into this area and it's pretty good. It's not perfect, but it is pretty good. Lets go to the other end of the line. I'm going to press control or command zero to zoom back out, and then let's test this end of the line. This is the end of the line that we can cut off because right now it's on top. Let's go and get the scissors tool and let's just lop it off a little bit here. Now if you take too much off, you could just try again. The scissors tool will let you just click on a line and remove that element from the line. Let's test that. It's pretty close. You may want to adjust this angle just a little bit. But we've got a good join there. Come back out, have a look at our line, decide if we're happy with it. We can increase the number of copies and we can zoom back out even more and just say how the balance is, that looks pretty good. I'm pretty happy with that, so I'll just click done. In that case, we drew a line as our starting point, which wasn't on a 45-degree angle, but we were able to make it a 45-degree angle by lining it up against a template line. Now if you're really suck at making these loops, let's see how you might do that. To make those loops, if you really are having problems with it, I would just go and make three lines. These are going to be our test lines or our markers. I'm going to select over all of them and I'm going to make sure that I've got aligned to selection, selected, and I'll just vertically distribute the centers so that these lines are all evenly spaced and let's make them red. Now I'm going to the pencil tool and I'm going to zoom in so I can see where I'm working a bit better. Now I can start drawing and I can see where I'm going to draw. Now sometimes it helps to draw more than you need because you might find that the first two really suck and the end ones are much better. In fact, I don't really like this and at all, but that's quite easy to deal with because I can just come in here with the eraser and get rid of that and probably reshape some of the others. With this line selected, you can just go to the pencil tool and just pick up where you think you've done a less than stellar loop and just re-draw it. You may find that those guides make things just a little bit easier. I've got five on either side here, that's all I need. I'm going to select the guidelines. I don't need those any longer. I also don't need such a big tail on this. Again, let's go and draw a 45-degree line that we can use as a template. We'll just rotate this around, now it should just rotate around 45 degrees. That should be sufficient holding the Shift key as I rotate it to just try and bring it in it that 45-degree angle, and we can test it. Probably not going to be too bad. I think we can probably work with that. With that selected, you're going to make it a bit smaller. I would of course, even add some of those lines before I start making it a pattern. But let's go object path and make, again lock everything and start bringing this in. It's not going to line up perfectly. Then let's start pushing the width out a little bit and then reducing the height so that we can try and bring these up as close as possible to joining. Now if we zoom back out, we're going to say that we do have a problem in this. The spacing here is too match. There's a big space at either end of the line. Let's go back to our alignments dim copies because we know we can. Then we can't use the eraser tool because it doesn't work in here for some reason. Let's go and use the scissors tool instead and get rid of that extra bit of line. Now let's try and bring this in a bit more. Again before you spend too much time on it, zoom back out again, turn dim copies of, make a few extra repeats and just double-check to make sure they're looking okay. If want to see where the joins are, you can just turn dim copies on. You can check that that's where the join is up there, then turned dim copies off and see if that is a problem, and if it's still a bit long then go and lop it off before you continue to make your pattern. Don't bother going and joining things up together until you're sure that you actually want to commit to joining at that position.
7. Pt 6 - Whimsical Scrapbook paper from a Loopy Pattern: One of the things that you can do with designs like this potentially, is to sell them as scrapbook paper. I just wanted to show you how you could get a whimsical look in terms of scrapbook paper with a design like this. In particular, this one that has lots of loops in it. I'm going to start by selecting the rectangle. I'm just going to choose edit copy because I want a copy of that on the clipboard so that I can paste it into a brand-new document. There are typically for scrapbook paper, you're going to want to be working in a 12 by 12 document. That's 12 inches by 12 inches. I'll choose file and then new. In this case, I'm going to create a document that's 12 inches by 12 inches in size, RGB color mode. I'm going to be using high raster effects at 300 PPI and I'll click create. I'm going to just paste in that rectangle filled with the patent that I had on the clipboard. I'll just choose edit, paste and then I'll press Delete. Now because I just paste this something in and deleted it you might be wondering what the purpose of that was. Well, the purpose of that was to make sure that the patent swatch itself would be added to the swatches panel. Simply pasting a shape that's filled with a patent into a document. Will add the pattern swatch to this swatches panel and even if you delete that patent filled object, the swatch still stays there. I'm going to create a rectangle that is the actual size of this document. It's 12 inches by 12 inches. I'm just making sure that it's exact right size and it is filled with this pattern. We've now got a patent paste that is the exact right size. What I wanted to do for this scrapbook paper is, I want to fill in some of these little loops with a color. There's a very simple way of doing that and that is expanding this patent filled object so that we can get access to this little loops. To do that with this shape selected, I'll choose object and then expand and just click okay. I'm going to do it a second time. Object, expand, and I'll click okay. Let's go to the last pallet and see what we have here. I'm going to make everything a little bit larger, so it's a little bit easier to see. We have a layer and inside that layer, is a group and inside that group is a clipping group. With everything selected here, we're going to release this clipping groups I'll choose object and then clipping mask and release. That releases the clipping mask. What I'm left with, is a little bit extra. Some of these pattern bits had been clipped away at the edge of this shape. We've just expanded everything very nicely, but we have got some stuff hanging over the edge here. You may have more or less hanging over the edge in your particular design. Here in the very top of this group, there's a group that has a single rectangle in it. I'm going to grab this rectangle and just drag it out of its group. It's now on the same level as these other little groups of objects. With everything selected here, I'm just going to make sure it's selected. I'm going to use this rectangle to crop the shapes underneath. To do that, I go to the pathfinder palette and just click crop. What I end up with is just the objects that I need cropped very nicely to make up this design. Having broken everything out of being a patent filled shape and having expanded everything, I can now get access to these little loops. The way I'm going to color those loops is with the live paint tool. I'm going to grab this layer and I'm going to choose object live paint, make. That just sets up the document so that we can use it as a live paint object. I'll go and get the live paint bucket tool. It shares a toolbar position with the shape builder tool. I'm going to click on the live paint bucket and then I'll double-click on the tool itself, because we need to make sure that setup the way we want it to be. What we want to do is paint fills not strokes. I'll paint these little loopy bits, not the lines themselves. I want cursors swatch previous because that's going to show me what color I'm going to be painting with. I want to highlight color of red. If you were working on a red background, then you could change your highlight color to something different just to make it easier to say this is just an indication as to where you're about to paint. With the live paint bucket tool, selected. I'm going to select some paint. I'm going to use these colors here. I'm going start with the orange. You can see in this mouse pointer that orange is the middle of the three colors just above the mouse pointer itself. What I need to do is to hover over something I want to fill with color with just one of these little loops and then just click. That will just fill that loop with color. I want to do about four of each of those colors. Now that I finished with the orange, I'm just going to press the right arrow key and that gets me to the red. You could also come over here and just select red. Just make sure that you've hovered either one of these little loops before you drop your paint into it. We'll go to pink again, I can click on pink, or I could have pressed the right arrow key to pick up that pink color. We're only going to fill. You can say I made a mistake there, so I'm just going to press undo. I'm only going to fill a few of those with each of these colors because I wanted to look irregular. We've got a very regular pattern because we created it as a repeating pattern swatch. In this case we're breaking up the pattern with just little hints of color. These are totally irregular. It's giving it a more whimsical look. Once you've taken a look at your design and if you're happy with it, if you've got enough color in it and not too much color, then what you'll do is expand your live paint object. Go to the last selected again and choose object and then live paint and choose expand. That just expanse the live paint object. We've got groups inside groups, inside groups here. We could just ungroup everything with object ungroup and then object ungroup again. We end up with just a whole series of shapes, some of which are colored and some of which are black. Which of the lines here. What I would do at this point is this choose object group and just group it all back into just a single group. You now have a very nice, neat and tidy document that is scrapbook paper size. To save it as scrapbook paper choose file and then export, and then export as. We need to give it a name. I'll click export. We're going to set this up to RGB color model because that's typically how scrapbook paper is packaged and sold. I'm using high-quality, again, typically at sold as high-quality illustration. I'm using a resolution of 300 PPI. That's a standard for selling scrap book paper. I'll just click okay. Now we can check the paper that we've created. I've got an open here in the Windows photo viewer. This is what the document is looking like. If I choose file properties, we can go ahead and have a look at the properties. You'll see that 3600 by 3600 pixels in size, which is 12 by 12 at 300 DPI. It's a bit depths of 24 bits. This is a perfect size document for selling as scrapbook paper. As a precaution, once you've created your scrapbook paper, you will want to save this AI file. In case you wanted to come in later on perhaps and change the colors that you've used to create yet another sheet of scrapbook paper from the same basic design.
8. Project and wrapup: We've now completed the video portion of this class and so it's over to you. It's time for you to practice the skills that you've just learned. Your class project is to create a diagonal line pattern. It can be a cross line pattern or it could just be a single diagonal line. You can turn it into a sheet of scrapbook paper if you would like to practice that skill as well. Post an image of your completed pattern in use, as your class project. Now, as you were working through this class, you probably saw a prompt which asked if you would complete a class recommendation. Please, if you did enjoy the class, would you complete that recommendation for me, as it helps 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, please click it to keep up to date with new classes as they're released. 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. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
9. Bonus Add a Background Color to the Pattern: This is a bonus video for the whimsical diagonal line pattern class.. The reason why I'm doing this video is that there was a question as to how you would put a background behind these patterns. Now there are a couple of ways that you can do it. I'm going to show you both ways. First of all, we've got a rectangle here that is filled with a repeating pattern. I'm going to the appearance panel, and what you can do in the appearance panel is you've got a stroke which we are not using and you've got your pattern fill which we are using. But you can add another fill, I'll click here on add new fill, and this fill is behind the previous fill, and it's also the exact same fill. We've got patterns stacked on top of each other. Well, if I click here, I can select a color and that will then be the background behind this pattern, it is as easy as just adding another fill to your document. But there is one proviso to this process if you want to change the size of your pattern. If I go to object transform and then scale, turn off transform objects and try to reduce the scale or increase the scale of the pattern, you'll see it's not working. The reason for this is that I had this fill selected. If you want to change the scale of your pattern after you've added this background, then you're going to need to make sure that you've got the right fill selected. Now if I choose object transform scale, I'll be able to change the scale of the pattern, I'm just going to increase it a bit, that's a bit small. But I can change the scale of the pattern, but I need to make sure that I'm working on the fill when I change the scale. Now there's another way of adding a background color to a pattern, the way that you do this actually embeds the color in the pattern pace. The pattern pace is always going to have that color in it. What I'm going to do is I'm going to drag this pattern pace out after swatches panel by native bit of space to work in. I'm going to move everything out of the way. I'm just holding the space-bar down as I move the art board out of the way. I'm going to grab this pattern and just drag it out of the swatches panel. Now, I need to be able to get into on any to see what's inside it, I'm going to open up the Layers panel and it's going to help me if I turn things off that I don't want unlock things down that I don't want to be able to see. I'm just locking away everything, this is the pattern pace here, just this object, this group. Now if I open up the group down at the very bottom of the group is going to be a single path and it's going to be a no fill, no stroke rectangle. Now every single pattern has this, no fill No stroke rectangle. What it's doing is it's marking out the edges of the pattern. What we're going to do is grab this and we're going to make a duplicate of it, I'm just going to drag it onto the new icon. Now I have to no fill, no stroke rectangles. Now the one I select is going to be the one that's not at the bottom because this no fill, no strike rectangle. It has to be no fill, no stroke and a has to be at the very bottom because it was not there. The pattern is going to break. But we're going to select the one just above it. Now we can fill that with a color, I'm applying a color to it. Now what I'm going to do is go and grab this entire group. All the objects that we dragged out of the swatches panel plus this rectangle which is a filled shape. But of course I've still got the no fill no stroke rectangle at the very back, we need that. Just going to drag this into swatches panel and just drop it there. Now I don't need this any longer, so I'm just going to turn it off and lock it down. But let's go back over here to this shape here. The first thing I'm going to do is strip everything out of it because it's got lots of fills and things. To strip everything out of this shape, I'll go to the fly-out menu here in the appearance panel, what I'm going to do is choose clear appearance and that just makes it no fill no stroke. All its appearances have disappeared, the fill is targeted, I'll click here on my new pattern swatch. My pattern swatch now has the color built into it, when we transform it, we don't have to work out which fill where going to transform because there is only one fill. It's the fill is the pattern, swirly lines plus the colored background. Sometimes it might be hard for you to actually bury the colored background inside a patter, particularly if you're selling them, you may want to give people the different colored patterns and you could make a set of these. You can make pink and blue and green and red and sell them as a range of different color patterns because some people won't know how to change the background and they won't want to do that. They just want to buy a whole series of patterns that are multicolored. Sometimes it may make sense to actually add the color to the pattern swatch. In other cases, you can simply just choose to add it as a second fill to your shape. I hope that answers the question and thank you to Mona and Adriana who both weighed in on this solution.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
