Whimsical Scrapbook Paper Designs to Sell in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Whimsical Scrapbook Paper Designs - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class. Whimsical scrapbook paper designs to make and sell 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 going to look at creating whimsical designs in Illustrator, that you can use a scrap-papers or backgrounds. You can make this to sell online or perhaps give away to your blog readers as a marketing tool. Now, as you're making these designs, you're going to learn a range of interesting and useful illustrated techniques that you can use every day. As you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt which asks if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, answer yes to the fact that you would recommend it to others. Secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy. 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 when I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started creating whimsical scrapbook papers and backgrounds to sell or give away. 2. Pt 1 Create a Whimsical Polkadot Design: When we're creating our whimsical scrapbook papers every one of these documents is pretty much going to be created in the same way. I'm going to spend a little bit of time first of all going over how we're going to set this up so that everything's going to work seamlessly as we go. I'm using Illustrator CC 2018. But in any version of Illustrator, you're just going to create a new file. Now, I'm going to create a file that is 12 inches by 12 inches because that's a typical scrapbook paper size. If you sell on Etsy or on any of the scrapbook paper sale sites, typically, they'll be selling 12 by 12 paper. If you're selling letter size paper, then put in the physical dimensions of a letter size sheet of paper. It's important that at this stage that we're working in inches and not in pixels and I'm going to explain to you why that's the case a little bit later. I'm working in RGB color mode. Again, that's available through these advanced options. I'm doing that because the sites that I sell on required 12 by 12 inch paper RGB color mode. They won't accept anything different. If the site that you're selling on or if your clients expect a different format then choose a different format in this dialogue. If you're not sure, then their settings are going to be pretty good, so I would opt for them. In the versions of Illustrator that have this new document dialogue, you're just going to click ''Create''. If you're working in an earlier version of Illustrator, your dialogues going to look a little bit more like this. You'll set your units to inches from the drop-down list here, type 12 by 12. In the advanced area here, you're going to click on ''Color mode'' as RGB and just click "Create Document" Regardless of how you got here, you should now have a 12 by 12 inches art board. The first design we're going to make is a whimsical polka dot design. For this, we're going to use the pencil tool, so I'm going to target the pencil tool here. We're also going to double-click on it so we can set it's settings. In later versions of Illustrator, you only have one slider here and I'm positioning my point here about halfway between Accurate and Smooth. If your version of Illustrator has more sliders here, what you're aiming for is something that's going to be slightly smooth but not totally smooth. You want to sit away from smooth it out totally and be well clear of save for minor lumps and bumps. You want a little bit of smoothing. Here I have the first three options they selected. This is really important, this one they have selected. It tells Illustrator to close the paths when they ends within a certain number of pixels. In my case, 15 pixels is pretty good for me. If you find it a little hard to position your mouse cursor back over your starting point, you may want to increase that value. I'll just click "Okay". I'm just going to draw a free hand circle and I don't mind that it's got some lumps and bumps because I want it to be a little bit organic. As I hold my mouse pointer over my starting point, you'll see that there's a little zero, a little o in the bottom corner that tells me I'm positioned within 15 pixels of my starting point. If I let go now, Illustrator will complete this and make it a filled shape. If you think your shape needs a little bit of smoothing out, select it with the selection tool and go to the smooth tool. Here you can just rub over the parts of the shape that you think could be smooth or a little bit. But really what we're looking for is an organic shapes, so the fact that there are some lumps and bumps is perfect. I'll click this icon here to switch the stroke and fill so I have a filled shape that has no stroke at all. I'll now hold the Shift key as I size it down because I want this to be a fairly small polka dot. It's just easier to draw it as a large one and shrink it than it is to try and draw it small in the first place. With this polka dot selected, I'll now choose Effect, Distort and Transform and then transform because what I want to do is to create a grid of polka dots that's over this document. If you think that making a pattern would help in this way, it's actually not going to do so because expanding a pattern ends up with shapes that are not circles. There are a whole lot of clipping paths and all things going on, so that's why we're using this transform effect to do it instead. I'll turn Preview on and I'm going to start moving my shape out of its own way. If this isn't far enough, you'll see that I've maxed out my slider here, you can just click in this box and start pressing the up Arrow key or Shift Up Arrow and that will move your shape further along. The maximum value on this slider is not representative of the maximum value you can actually move the shape. I'm just going to make this 1.6, so it's a nice round value. Now I'll increase the number of copies so I fill my document and click "Okay" Now I'm going to do that going down. With it still selected, I'll choose Effect, Distort and Transform and then transform. I am going to apply this as a new effect. I don't want to edit the existing effect and I can't do that by doing this selection. I want to apply a new effect. Again, turn Preview on. This time I'm going to use the same 1.6 inches of movement and I'm going to increase the number of copies so I fill my sheet of paper. I will click ''Okay" At this point, everything is attached to this one circle. In fact, the entire document is just one circle with a whole series of transformation effects applied to it. If I go to the Appearance Panel, here is my shape and it's got two transform effects on it that are creating this grid. I want to expand my shapes out of here, so I'll choose object, Expand, Appearance and I'll choose object Ungroup. I'll do that until ungroup is no longer an option and that is three times in this case. Now if I go to the last pallet, you'll say that we have one layer in the document with lots of individual shapes on it. Each one of these shapes is now individually selectable and it is an entire objects. It's not made up of lots of little bits with clipping paths or anything. Now I'm going to select either all the shapes and I want to break up this grid. This is way too regular for me. I want to make it look a whole lot more whimsical. With all these objects selected, I'm going to choose Object and then Transform and then Transform Each. Now this Transform Each dialog allows me to transform each of these shapes individually but all at the same time. Let me just show you what we're going to use it for. I'm going to type in 50 percent into the width and height and that changes the width and height of every one of these shapes to 50 percent of what it was previously. Look what happens when I turn the Random option on. These shapes are now being re-size to some value between 50 percent and the original 100 percent. The horizontal and vertical values are being forced to gather so we're not getting eggs out of this, so they're not changing to be long ovals. They're actually being changed in perfect scale. It's just that some combination of values between 50 percent and 100 percent are being used, so we're getting a different result. Each one of these looks different size to the others. Well, we can move them as well using this Random option. Now in this case, I don't want 50 percent. I really just did that so you could see what the values would look like. I'm going to offer something a bit more like 80 percent so the sizes are a little bit more regular. You can also get a different arrangement if you click on one of these transform points. You might find that you get a more whimsical polka dot pattern by doing just that. You can also adjust the angle. Each one of these has a very slight bump on its right-hand side. Well, if we change the angle, then they're all going to be rotated different amounts and those little bumps are going to rotate around the shapes and they're not going to be quite so obvious. What you're looking for at this point is a design that works for you. When you're happy with it and just click "Okay" This is my scrapbook paper design. This is what I'm going to use for my scrapbook paper. I'd like a background for those, so I'm going to click on the "Rectangle tool" click in make a 12 by 12 rectangle because that's the size of my art board. I'm going to double-click on the color so that I can make it a color of my choice. I need to make it centered over the document, so I'm going to the Align panel here. If your Align panel doesn't show these options here, you just click the Flyout menu and choose Show Options and choose a line to art board that allows you to horizontally and vertically aligned this shape so it's placed over the art board. If you are not seeing your panels down this side here, you can always get to them by choosing Window, and then the panel name. In this case, you would go for the Align panel. This shape needs to be behind everything. With it still selected, I'll choose Object, Arrange, Send to back. Now I'm going to select everything on this lab because what I want to do is to change the color of my dots. With everything selected, I can come down here to the bottom to this rectangle, hold the Shift key and click on this icon here, the little blue box. If I click on that, it's removed from the selection, so that just allows me to remove a single object or Shift click on any number of objects to remove from current selection, just a nice little technique for selecting things. I'm going to double-click on the fill color and at this point, I want to fill my shapes with something that is almost white. It's critical that this is not white. White is 255, 255, 255 or six Fs in this box and you don't want white because it's going to come back to haunt you a little bit later on. You can get pretty close to white, but just don't make it white. I'm going to make those that sort of slightly off-white and click "Okay" This is the starting point for my color waves for my scrapbook paper. To make it a little bit easier for me in the next video, when we go to do the coloring, I'm going to select everything by pressing Control or Command A. I'm going to the Swatches panel here and I'm going to click on ''New Color group'' and I'll select Selected Artwork and just click "Okay" That creates this set of colors as a color group. In the next video, we're going to come back and make some different color waves for our art. 3. Pt 2 Create Two color color ways: We're now ready to go ahead and to create some color waves for our art. I've just lost my last panel, so I'm just going to go and get it. I'm going to select all of these shapes. Just remove the rectangle from the shapes. I'm just going to enlarge these, just a little bit. I think, I'd like them to fill the paper a little bit better. So, I'm just holding the 'Shift' key as I just drag on the corners of this selection, just to move my shapes a little bit further towards the edges of my paper. At this point, I would go ahead and save my design as an Illustrator file, just so that you've got it, so that you can work on it again in future and you're not going to lose your work if something happens to your computer. At this point, we're going to have a look at creating some different color waves for our art. Typically, when I have a piece of art that has more than two colors in it, the workflow will be that, I'm going to save this file. I'll come in and make my color changes, and then I'll save it as a new file. So, I'll give it a different name. I might call it polka dots one, polka dots two, polka dots three. Each of my color waves is going to be in a separate file. The reason for that is that the 'Recolor' dialog doesn't make things really easy for you, if you've got more than two colors. If you've got two colors, then you can do everything inside the one document, and we're going to do that today, just so that you can see how it works. I'm going to press "Control" or command 'A' to select everything. I'm going to click here on this icon which is 'Edit' or 'Apply Color Group'. In this dialogue, because we chose white as being not quite white, it's currently mapped onto itself, and blue is mapped onto blue. That's exactly what you want to say. If you were to use white or black as one of those colors, chances are these wouldn't be mapped onto themselves, and you're going to end up with multiple colors. You're going to end up with three colors, which is just, really awful. I'm really not sure why 'illustrator' does it. Provided you don't use white, and you use something close to white, then this is going to work perfectly. At this point I'm going to click 'Edit'. Then, make sure that these 'harmony colors' here are unlocked. It's going to have a literal line through it. This is the whitish color, and this is the blue color. You can now drag them around to create different color waves for your design. So, I'm going to create one more yellow and purple. Once you get a color wave that you like, you click here on 'New Color Group', because you want to create this as a brand new color group and click 'OK'. The reason why we're creating as a 'New Color Group', is that we still got this old color group here. With everything selected, I can double-click on this and those colors are being applied to my design. Now, 'illustrator', in its wisdom, has decided that it wants the colors to be the wrong way round, but it's easy enough for me to just click on this 'Randomly change color order', because I've only got two colors. The color order is really easy to change, so I can get back to my two-color paper very, very easily. You can go ahead and create different color waves. I've got my piece of art selected. Double-click on this. I'm going back into the 'Edit' dialogue here. I'm going to unlink my 'harmony colors'. I'm going to go and find some different colors to work with. Let's go for some pinks and reds. Perhaps create this as a 'Color Group'. Click 'OK'. Now, I can get back to any combination of these colors. If 'illustrator' puts the colors the wrong way round, I can just click here to reverse them. Or, I may want to create different papers using these same two colors, reverse of each other. So, that I have one with a purple background and yellow dots, and then one with the same colors but in reverse. You can do that easily. If you see this dialog, you can click 'Yes' or 'No'. It doesn't really matter. The colors are just sitting there so you can get back to them at anytime. At this point, I would continue to investigate different color waves that I might want to use for this piece of scrapbook paper. These colors are going to be saved with the document, so it's very easy to come back at a later date and re-apply the selected colors to the document. Let's double-click on this. Click 'OK', and here are our colors. Now, before we finish up with this first sheet of scrapbook paper, it's really important that we save it. So let's step through the save process now. 4. Pt 3 Save your paper ready for distribution: To save this file as a scrapbook paper design, first of all, you're going to save the II file. But to save it for sale or for delivery to a client, you will generally want a JPEG. Most online selling sites will sell these as JPEGs. I'll choose file and I'm going to choose Export, and then Export As. I'm going to type a name for the file and make sure that it's saved in the location I want it to be saved into. I'm going to call this Poker.1 and from the drop-down list here, I'm going to make sure that I have selected JPEG. Now I'm going to select "Use Artboards". The reason for this is if any of these dots were outside the artboard, we can apply a clipping to that art board size on export, so use artboards saves to illustrate. If anything over the edge of this artboard just ignore it. All I want is this 12 by 12 art board to be saved, so you're effectively clipping at the same time as you're saving. To some people, you may want to have elements over the side and you may want them to be clipped, so select, "Use Artboards" and then click Export. Now here you have to make a decision as to the quality versus the compression. In this case, I'm going to opt for a larger file because most of the sites that I work with want high-quality JPEGs, so you want a large size high resolution JPEG. From the Resolution dropdown list, we're going to set this to 300 pixels per inch, because we want a 12 by 12 document; 12 inch by 12 inch sheet of paper that is printable at 300 DPI. This is going to give us, at the end, a 3,600 by 3,600 pixel document. That's why it was important to set it up as 12 by 12 to start off with, because illustrator is about to do some math for us. It's going to multiply 12 by this 300 and it's going to give us the right size document. When you're done here, you can just click "Okay". Now if we go to the folder which we store the file in, we can have a look at it. I've got the file selected here. I'm going to "Properties" and Details. You'll see here that we've got a document that's 3600 by 3600 pixels in size and its resolution is 300 DPI. This is exactly the size document, the number of pixels, the resolution that is required for sale on the site that I use for selling my scrapbook papers and it's a typical size, it's not a magical size. Most sites will use something like this. That's how you set up the document and save it as the right size, the right resolution so that it can be printed successfully. I would go ahead now and re-create the second sheets. I'm going to press Control or Command A to select everything. I'll go and apply the second set of colors and then I'll do exactly the same thing; "File", "File Export", "Export As". I'm going to call it Poker.2. I'm going to select to use artboards and click "Export". I'm going to use exactly the same settings as I did previously and click "Okay". If we have a look at the folder that we saved it into, we now have our second file, right-click it on a Windows machine and choose "Properties" and we can check its details and again, we have a 36 by 3,600 pixel document at 300 DPI, exactly the resolution and size that we need for distributing this as scrapbook paper. There's the first of our whimsical designs. We're going to work a little quicker through the next ones, as we won't be spending time on the setup and saving. 5. Pt 4 Ticking stripes: Our second whimsical pattern is going to be based on a striped pattern. I just want to show you what I'm talking about before we start. This is a fabric and they call it Mattress Ticking. Typically it's used to cover mattresses and particularly really old mattresses. But I really love the look of this stripe fabrics, so what we're going to do is we're going to create a ticking stripe and then we're going to make it look a little bit more whimsical. With that in mind, we're going to start with a new document. I'm going to choose File and New and of course I'm using a 12 by 12 inch document RGB color exactly as we did for the first document. I'll click, "Create". Now we need to create a stripe and for my stripe, I'm just going to drag out a rectangle. It's going to be a long, thin rectangle. It is going to go a little ways over the edge of the artboard. I'm going to make it filled with a solid color, and I do want a stroke as well, but I need to set some colors up at this point. I'm going to double-click on the fill color. I've chosen the fill color, which is very easy to add yourself. It's 80 in red, a 100 in green and just 120 in blue. It's this really nice blue gray color, really attractive color. This is a Mattress Ticking color. We're going to double-click on the stroke color because I want to make it a gray. The gray I've chosen is 205 then 200, 200. If you watch my videos, I very seldom, ever specify colors. It's just I found these colors as I was working. If you want to do something that looks like this, just go use my colors because that's what they are, but otherwise just choose colors of your preference. Let's click okay. This is a warm gray. It's a red gray. It's got a little bit more red in it than just gray. Let's see where we are right now. I'm going to select over this rectangle and just increase the stroke weight to two pixels. This is a balance that I want, but I want another stroke on the outside of everything. To make things a little bit easier, I'm going to actually save my colors, so I'm just going to select either my shape. I'm going to swatches panel. I'm going to click here on New Color Group. I'm going to do Selected Artwork and click okay. That puts these two colors in my color swatch here as global colors. That makes them so much easier to pick up later on. I suggest that if you're working with specific colors, and you want to come back and use a color again, it's always a really good idea to just pop it into your swatches panel. I'm going to select over my shape. I'm going to the Appearance panel. You don't see it, choose Window and then Appearance. Now, the Appearance panel is a place where you can add an additional stroke to a shapes. I want one on the outside, so I'm going to click here to add a new stroke. It's really important that you have your shapes selected before you do this otherwise, you're just adding a stroke to thin air, and you'll never say it. Now we can come down here and select that color, which was the reason why I wanted to create the color as a color swatch because it's just easier to find it and use it again. Now, it needs to be, I think, about 0.75 of a pixel. It needs to be very narrow, so I'm just going to put in 0.75. The problem with this is that sitting over the top of the gray and I want it to be outside the gray. Well, to do that, I need to move it. So, with this strokes like, that I want to make sure that the stroke only is selected, nothing else. I'm going to choose Effect and then Path and then Offset Path. Turn preview on so you can see what you're doing. Right now this path is offset 0.1389 inches. Well, I want to offset it, I think, something like one pixel. I'm just going to type one. Because I'm working on a 12 by 12 document Illustrator is determined to give me everything in inches, but I can tell it if I want a different measurements. I'm saying you're going to give it to me in inches, but why don't you do the calculation because I can't be bothered. One pixel and illustrating with okay, so that's 0.139 inches. Well, I'm glad it did them a calculation and I didn't have to. The visual is that everything's working really nicely. I've got my gray blue middle, I've got my pale gray red gray, stroke and then the other stroke on the outside, so I'm just going to click, "Okay". Here is my ticking stripe. Press "Control or Command" zero to zoom back out, remembering that we're working at full size. If you want to get an idea as to how this is looking, just increase the zoom. Just come in here and zoom it up until it is approximately 12 inches. Hold a ruler over your screen, have a look at it. This is what your stripe is going to look like. Now I need more of these stripes, and so I'm going to select it and choose Effect, Distort and Transform and then Transform exactly the same way as we did the dots early at term preview on so you can see what you're doing. Start moving this, so you can see how far your stripes are apart and then just increase your copies. One of the reasons why I wanted to put the stripes over the edges of the artboard is you'll see that because the base shape was a rectangle, the strokes are actually round the edge around the top. We're going to get rid of that a little bit later by clipping it away. For now, just be aware that it's a good idea to make sure your stripes extend beyond the art work, just a little bit. Now, if that is too far away or too close together, you can always just adjust this. You can come in here and get your perfect scales. You can adjust this using the up and down arrow keys. You can adjust it using the slider here, or you can just type a value in here. I'm pretty happy with this, but I think I need another copy because I'm going to move my stripe back over in a minute. In fact, I'm going to add another couple of copies just for good measure. Once you're happy, click "Okay". Remembering that when you do a Distort and Transform, everything is just attached to the first shape that you created. So, I could just bring my stripe back over here and just center the whole thing up for the art board. Control or Command 0 to zoom back out. I'm going to do a double-check to make sure that I'm happy with everything before I select it and now expand it with Object, Expand Appearance, and then Object Ungroup and continue to do that until Ungroup is no longer an option. Then go to the last panel. What we expect to see is a whole series of paths, no groups, just paths. Here we are. Each one of those rectangles with its stroke is one of these paths. I'm going to zoom out a little bit more, still, so I can see the surrounds to my document, just holding the "Alt" option key as I zoom and then holding the space bar to change to this little hand icon, which allows me to move my workspace back into position. Holding the space bar always brings up this option of moving things around. It's just a nice little shortcut. We've got our basic stripe. If you wanted this to be a piece of scrapbook paper, you could save that as a piece of scrapbook paper, it's a nice little design, but we're here to make more whimsical things, so we're going to use a tool on this to make it look a little bit more whimsical. The tool that we're going to be using is called the pucker tool. It shares a toolbar position here with the width tool. Click on the pucker tool to target it and then go back and double-click on the icon. The reason for this is that you need to set up your brush before you start because the defaults are just not going to work. What I've got is I've set my brush to a width of about five inches, something like about half the size of the sheet of paper. Five, six inches is good. Five or six inches on the highest is good too, because that means that you're working with a round brush. You don't need an angle on this, but you will need to adjust the intensity because we want to get a whimsical look, but we don't want to actually butcher this pattern. Intensity, I've set mine to about 2 percent. I found that was quite sufficient, so really, really low value. I didn't change any of the other defaults here, but I did make sure that I could show the brush size because it's handy to be able to say the brush as you work. So, I'll click "Okay". Now we don't even need to select these lines. You can just go and start working with the pucker tool. What you're going to do is just click. Just click on some areas in the document to just knock these lines off their alignment. Now if I click and press, you'll say that the pucker tool just goes and does its job and really, really puckers things. What I'm doing is just tapping because I want it to operate it that 2 percent. I want a really, really light puckering. I don't want to destroy this totally, but if you did like this effect, then go and use it. Just hold down your mouse button and it's just going to keep puckering while you hold the mouse button down. You're going to do this until you get a result that you like. This is part of the reason why I wanted to go over the edges is so that you can bring in some of these lines, a few pucker, these are going to come in over the edge. When you're done, you're ready to save this as your scrapbook paper. You're going to save it as an AI file first of all, so you can come back in and change it if you need to or want to. You're going to need to crop this to the art board. As you saw when we save the polka dot pattern, if you choose, use artboards in the export options, then it's going to be cropped to the artboard anyway. If you want to crop it just because you like the visuals of it being cropped on the screen, then go to the rectangle tool and make a 12 by 12 or whatever size your artboard is, rectangle. You're going to center it over the entire object. Select everything by just dragging over it or press Control or Command A. Right-click and choose Make Clipping Mask. A Clipping Mask works by creating a shapes, in this case a 12 by 12 rectangle. You select the things that you want to cut or clip to that rectangle, and then you make your Clipping Mask. In the last panel, you'll end up with your rectangle. Here is our rectangle. The fill has been removed from it. That's the way Clipping Masks work, although you can fill it if you want to, it's just that it's fill is removed as its creators, a Clipping Mask. Inside here too, are all the paths that we chose to clip to this shape. It's not a crop, it's just a clip and you still can get to all of your objects, and you can easily recover them and stuff like that too. There is our second whimsical pattern. In this case it is Mattress Ticking, and we've got this warped Mattress Ticking whimsical pattern for a scrapbook paper. 6. Pt 5 Triangle whimsical pattern: For our next whimsical pattern, we're going to create a little triangle one and we're going to use a different technique yet again. I'm going to click on create new to start my documents 12 by 12 inches RGB color mode. Always documents are exactly the same as the previous one. Now for our triangle, we're going to need to go to the polygon tool so select the polygon tool here and just click once in your document, you're going to set the number of sides to three and the radius is a fairly meaningless concept so just click okay. You get something that you can see. We're going to flip the fill and strikes with a black fill and I'm going to remove the stroke here. I also want to rotate this triangle so it's pointing down just because I like the pattern better that way. I'm just hovering over the top right-hand corner, you can hover over any corner, hold the shift key, and just rotate it until it's 180 degrees of rotation. Again, hold the Shift key and I'm just going to size it down to a smaller size because that's about the size that I want my triangle to be. Now we're going to use a scatter brush for this, and we're going to get a really interesting and whimsical effect using the scatter brush. Let's select our triangle, go to our brushes palette. If you don't see yours, choose window and then brushes, you're going to click here on the new brush icon, click scatter brush, click okay. That creates this as a scatter brush and at this stage, all you need to do is to select the colorization method as tints and just click okay. You can now remove this triangle because you don't need it any longer. Next up, we're going to the line segment tool. I'm going to click once in my document, I'm making a line that is the width of my page because I'm working with 12 by 12 inches, that means I'm going to have a 12" line and zero degrees of angle. I'll click okay. Now I want to center this on the board, so I'm just going to click here on horizontal aligned center. I'm also going to make sure that my line has some color, so let's target the stroke and let's give it a black stroke. With the selection tool, I'm just going to select over this line, holding the shift key, just move it up a little bit to approximately where I want it starting position to be. With the line selected, I'm now going to apply my brush. So I'm going to the brushes palette. I'm just just going to click here on my scatter brush, and this gives me my initial scatter brush. It's obviously not what I want, so I'm going to double-click on the brush here in the brushes palate. It's really important here that we make adjustments to the entire brush. At this stage, we're going to set size, spacing, scatter, and rotation all to random. Just want to randomize this brush. Now for size, I want to go between about 70 percent and 100 percent so that some of these triangles are a little bit smaller than others. In fact, I still think my triangle is a little bit big to start off with, so I'm actually going to make it go between 70 and 90 percent, just some variation in size. Now the spacing is way too small, so I'm just going to click in this spacing box and start pressing the shift up arrow key because that increases the spacing very quickly and right now, I'm just looking at the maximum spacing. Now let's go and do that in the second box. We're going to adjust this until we see a result that we like. I want my triangles to be pretty spread out. I'm up to 324 the maximum and I'm going to be about 240 for the minimum so that's the spacing I'm looking at. For the scatter, if we go in a negative direction that's below the line, positive direction is above the line, we want a little bit of scatter so I'm going to come down to minus 20 percent below and plus 20 percent above. Of course, if you're not seeing any of this, you will want to turn preview on so that you can see it actually on the line. For rotation, again, minus is going to rotate it in one direction, positive is going to rotate in another direction. I just want to tip these a little bit, so I'm thinking probably about minus 10 and positive 10 will give me just that little bit of a jiggle in my triangles. Once I'm happy with what I'm seeing on the screen, if I need to make any adjustments, I can do so now. I still think I'm a bit big, so I'm going to do 70 to 80 percent range and click okay. When you're prompted, if you want to leave strokes or apply to strokes all we want to apply the change to our strokes, we're just going to click on apply to strokes. Now we want to duplicate our line. With the line selected using the selection tool, we're going back to effect distort and transform, and transform will turn preview on. We want a few copies on this, so start with 10, and we'll start moving this down in a vertical direction, which is a positive value on most of the most recent versions of illustrator. What I'm looking for here is a spacing that's going to work for me. I know these lines are duplicated, so everything looks like every other line, that's fine, we're going to fix that in a moment. What I'm looking for right now is just, do I have the right spacing here? It's the vertical spacing that I'm looking at. I'm thinking that's probably a little bit too much. I'm going to settle for about 0.87" and click okay. Now our problem is that each of those rows mimics every other row, so we want to stop that from happening. The first thing I'm going to do is go to the appearance panel. I'm actually going to turn off the scatter brush. I'm going to open this scatter brush here and just click basic, so I end up with just lines. If you don't see the appearance panel choose window and then appearance. Now with this line selected because everything is just attached to this line, I'm going to choose object, expand appearance, and then object ungroup. I'm going to do that until ungroup is no longer an option. So if we go to the last pallet or we're going to do is have a single layer with a whole series of lines on it, just parts which are lines, very simple stuff. I'm going to choose select all, control or command I. Now I'm going back to my scatter brushing, I'm going to apply my scatter brush to these lines. Now you can see that it's behaving very differently. Each of these lines is getting a scatter brush and every one of them is a little bit different to the other. Now at this point you can select over everything and you can start working with this to get a slightly different look. One of the looks that you might want to do is to move these lines over a little bit so that you don't get this effect down the side of the page. Well, for that I'm going to use object transform and then transform each. Because transform each is going to move each of these lines if I select random a different amount up to whatever the horizontal movement is that I specify. I've got about 0.25" here, but I can increase or decrease that and with random turned on, each one of those lines is being moved a little bit differently so I can just click okay. At this point you need to ask yourself what is going to happen with pieces that are over the edge. Do you want everything to be inside the sheet of paper? In which case you want to start moving things around a little bit, or are you happy with things over the edge? If you want to, everything inside the paper, then you're going to need to select on everything and perhaps move these up just a little bit. I'm just nudging them with the up arrow tool just to move that bottom line of triangles into the paper. Then I'll go ahead and select any of these lines that are outside the sheet of paper and just tip them into the paper. I'm just going to make the lines a little bit shorter and that's going to adjust the lines a bit and make sure that all my triangles are on the inside. I will continue to do that until every single triangle is inside my paper. If you're happy with things being over the edge and actually actively want that to be the case, then select over these shapes and you can start pulling them a little bit so you can make the lines a little bit bigger so that they do go over the edge. When you're done, you're just going to go ahead and save your paper and that is file, export, export as. I'm going to type triangle, I'm going to select to use artboard so that this will be cropped to the art board size automatically. Click export. Again, I'm going to set this at 300 ppi and just click okay. That is completed, a black and white version of my whimsical looking scrapbook paper. Of course, if we want to change the color, we're just going to select everything with control or command A. Because these shapes are still brushes on a line, then by changing the stroke color, we can change the brush color. I'm going to go and get one of my favorite colors, that's teal green. Now we have teal green triangles on our background. If you wanted a colored background, then you just going to put a 12 by 12 inch rectangle over the top of everything, move it underneath by selecting object, arrange center back and that would send your rectangle behind everything here. You just want to square it up on the artboard. That's exactly what we've done previously. In this case we are able to recolor it because we've used a brush and because we set our brush to teens, that's why this was really important. You have to set your methods to teens. If you don't set it to teens, then you're going be stuck with a black brush. 7. Pt 6 Layered Triangle Design: Our last whimsical pattern is going to be a triangle pattern and it again is going to be created in a different way to the others. I'm just going to click on Create and create a 12 by 12 inch sheet of paper. I'm going to select the Polygon tool again, click once in the document, make sure that the sides are set to three and just ignore the radius and click Okay. At this point I'll select the selection tool and shift drag on the corner handle so that I'm just enlarging my triangle. I don't want it to have a fill, so I'll turn the fill off and it just has a stroke and I'm going to increase the stroke weight just a little bit. Now I want to make this triangle look a little bit more hand-drawn. To do this with it selected, I'll choose effect and then distort and transform. I'm going to use the roughen option here. When you open the roughen dialogue, first click Preview so you can see what the default settings are. Obviously, you want something a little bit less rough than this. I'm going to start decreasing the size. I'm going to take that for now down to about one percent and then the detail is currently set to 10 per inch. I'm going to start reducing that, but not all the way down. You can also experiment with smooth points or corner points, the corner points and looks a little bit better for this. I'm going to settle for this and just click Okay. At this stage I have a triangle, but if I select at the appearance panel, you'll see that what the triangle is just a triangle with a roughen effect applied to it. For us to do anything further with this triangle, we should really expand the appearance of this shape so that we bake this effect into it. For this, I'll choose Object and then Expand Appearance. Now you'll see that the triangle just has a stroke and a fill and this is now my triangle. At this point, if you think it's still a little bit rough, you can smooth it. Select the triangle and choose object and then path and simplify lousy to simplify the triangle. It started off at 45 points, it's now down to nine points. With preview turned on, you can adjust the settings to perhaps get somewhere between where you started and where you are now. You can always click show original to see what the original looked like and what it looks like now. I'll click okay. With my triangle, I'm now going to make a duplicate of it. I'm going to Alt or option drag a duplicate away. I'm going to shrink it down a little bit and I'm going to rotate it. I'm going to read off the rotation because I can't actually hold the Shift key to rotate it because I'm rotating it, something that is not a multiple of 45 degrees. I'm just looking for roughly a 120 degrees of rotation. Now you'll see that the bounding boxes off on the shape now. I'm going to choose object transform reset bounding box. The bounding box is now a little bit squarer. I'm just going to size this and place it in position inside the other triangle. I'm going to Alt drag another duplicate of this larger triangle. This time I'm going to rotate it around 240 degrees, which is twice 120. Object, Transform, Reset Bounding Box. Hold the Shift key to re-size the triangle and I'm going to move it into position and just adjust its size if it needs it. You can also just tweak its position. I'm just using the arrow keys to do this. You can see that as I've scaled this triangle, the effect of the stroke has been scaled as well. That's because in my settings I have set scale strokes and affects. Edit preferences, generals, scale strokes and effects are set on. If you don't have that enabled, then your strokes are going to stay consistent. Of course, if you're working on a Mac, it's going to be Illustrator preferences. I want all my strikes to be the same, so I'm actually going to select over all of this shapes and just go and increase the stroke weight. I end up with all my stroke while it's the same, I'm using about five pixels. I'm going to take one final copy of this triangle. This time, I'm going to flip the stroke and fill, just shrink it down and place it in position. Now, I've got the basic shapes that I am going to be working with. I'm going to select over this entire set of objects and choose object group, that will put them in a group, so they'll move together. I'm also going to shrink them down to a size that's more appropriate to work with. Because I've got scale strokes and effects selected, everything has scaled really nicely. Going to place my triangle shape just over the top of the document here. And I'm going now to select it and choose effect, distort and transform and then transform. I'll turn preview on. I'm going to increase the number of copies so that we can see what happens when we start moving it in a horizontal direction. Well, what we get is all of these triangles side-by-side. But I'd like a triangle in the middle here. If I choose reflect Y, that's what I get. Each of these triangles is reflected from the one previously across the Y-axis. I'm getting this flip triangle look. Now I want mine close together, so I'm going to have to decrease the distance between them. 0.625 is too much, 0.5 is too little, so somewhere between those two is my ideal values. I'm going to have to put this in manually. It's going to be something like 0.55. Let's try 0.56, that's a bit better. I am going to increase my number of copies, so I go all the way across my document, click okay. I need to fill a document vertically, so with my shape selected, remembering that when you use distort and transform, it's the original shape that has all these transformations applied to it, so that you have to select, Effect, Distort and Transform and then transform. Yes, I do want to apply a new effect. I want preview turned on. I want to be able to see my copies. I'm going to start moving everything in a vertical direction. 0.875 isn't enough and one inch is too much. I'm going to increase this test out 0.9, it's not quite enough let's try 0.93 and 0.94. You'll find that you have to tab away from this box to be able to see your change in place, that's pretty good. I'm going to increase the number of copies to fill my sheet of paper and click okay. This entire design is linked to this one shape up here. When I select over it and turn the transforms off, you can see that all I have is one shape with two transformations applied to it. If I want to make changes to the design, I can do it by selecting the shape and making changes to it. One of the things I may want to do is to change the weight of the lines. Let's just turn everything back on again. I'm going to select the group selection tool because when I have the group selection tool selected, it allows me to make a selection inside a group. In this case, I want to select just the lines and not the filled triangle. With one line selected, I'm going to choose, Select Same and choose Stroke Weight and that selects all three of these lines. I'm just going to decrease the stroke weight a little bit. I'm taking it down to 0.75 because I really like this very fine line effect. I'm going to click away from the shape. I'm going to click back on the group selection tool because this time I want to select the triangle in the middle. It's very black right now and it might look better if it was a gray. I'm going to target its fill and go and make it a mid gray. I'm liking that pattern or that design a lot better. As with all the other patterns, we can very easily save this. We would save it as an AI file and then we'll export it as a 12 by 12 sheet of paper at 300 DPI, so that it's going to print nicely at 300 PPI on 12 by 12 paper. 8. Project and wrap up: Your project for this class will be to create one or more of these whimsical designs yourself. You can create them as any size document that you want. Be aware that if you want 12 by 12 scrapbook paper, then you should be starting of course with that 12 by 12 document. Post an image of your completed design or designs as your class project. I hope that you've enjoyed this class, I hope that you've learned things about illustrator that you weren't aware of before you took this class. As you are 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, do two things for me. Firstly, say yes that you would recommend it to others. Secondly, write just a few words about why you enjoy the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and may learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class 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.