Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to this video tutorial today. We’re going to look at a quick, easy and basically foolproof way of creating diagonal line patterns in illustrator. We’ll start with a brand new document. I’m going to make one. That is a thousand by a thousand pixels in size, but because we’re working with vector graphics, it really doesn’t matter. How big your document is we’re going to apply a stroke to this shape. We’re about to create, but no fill. So make sure you turn the fill off and you just have a stroke. Black is fine just for now, go to the line segment tool and click on it to select it. Then click once inside your document. You’re going to add a line segment. It doesn’t matter too much how long it is. I’m going to make mine a hundred pixels long, but if you’re going to have diagonal lines at a 45 degree angle, then make it a 45 degree angle and click OK. So this is our line at the moment. It’s one pixel in width, so I’m going to make it a bit wider. I’m going to use, say six pixels in width. Now I’m working in Illustrator CC, and this is going to work for any version of illustrator from CS6 through all the CC versions, I’ll select over my shape and then choose object pattern, make click, OK, The settings down here at the bottom. Have no impact on your pattern at all. So if you want to see more of your pattern, you can, for example, set it to nine by nine. I’ve got my copies dimmed to seventy percent right now, but I’m going to go turn that off, So my copies won’t be dimmed at all what I’m going to focus on, And this is going to affect the pattern. Is this area here? I’ve got my width and height constrained here. So this little icon is turned on, so lets. Just make sure it is turned on. I’m going to click in here. I need to bring the width of my pattern down And this, also because it’s linked will bring the height of my pattern down, so I’ll start pressing the down arrow key, and I just need to press it until my lines become solid. If I zoom in here and you can use the zoom tool inside the pattern, make tool you’ll see that I’ve got a perfectly smooth transition here. If I turn off the tile edge, it’s impossible to see where the original shape was and where the pattern itself is, and that’s exactly as it should be. My pattern is now made. So all I need to do is to click here on done. I’m finished with my shape, so I’ll select over it and press delete. I’ll add a rectangle. That is the size of the artboard in my case. That’s going to be a thousand pixels by a thousand pixels. Ill center it on the artboard. Go over here to the align options. Make sure I have selected a line to artboard and then I’ll click on the center options here. I don’t want it to have a stroke, so I’ll turn the stroke off and I will target the fill because that will allow me to fill this shape with my pattern. I’ll go across here to the swatches panel. Here’s my pattern, I’ll click on it. At this point, you can increase or decrease the pattern size by selecting your object and choose object transform and then scale make sure to turn off transform objects and turn preview on. You want to transform your pattern, not your object. So if we bring down our pattern to 50 you’ll see that we’ve shrunk our pattern if we increase it to to, for example, 200 percent, then we’ll make it a whole lot larger. Now I’m seeing some fracture lines through this pattern. That’s illustrator, not the pattern. If you want to disable the option, that’s causing these fracture lines to appear, choose edit and then preferences general and disable anti-aliased artwork and click OK, and that will smooth out the pattern. If you’re working on a mac, you’ll go to illustrator and then preferences, etc. Now you can also use a similar process to create multi-colored patterns. Let’s just go and select this shape and delete it and let’s start again with our line, so I’m going to make sure that there’s no fill on this line and that the stroke in this case is black. I’ll make a 100 pixel 45 degree angle line and I’m just going to increase this to 6 or 7 pixels. Now, let’s make it six pixels again. I’m going to select this line and I’m going to make a duplicate Do that by holding the alt or option key as I drag a second copy of the line away this one, I’m going to make a different color, so I’m going to choose a sort of red color. We’ll select over both of these lines object pattern, make same process you can increase the number of objects that you have here visible on the screen. We can show our tile edge again. That might help you line everything up. We’re going to start decreasing the width and height because we want to join things up, but you can see here that just decreasing the width is not having an effect on lining these lines up. We’re actually going to have to decrease the height. So I’m just going to undo this icon here, so I can reduce the height manually and what I want to do is to join the lines up. We’ll, zoom in and just make sure that everything looks perfect. Close up! When I turn off show tile edge, it’s impossible to see where the joins are. So that’s telling me This is a perfect multi-colored diagonal line pattern. I’ll click done again. I’ll select these lines and remove them again. I’ll add a rectangle that is the size of the artboard and align it to the artboard. I’m going to turn off the stroke. I don’t want it to have a stroke here as its fill. I’m going to fill it with our pattern. And again we could increase or decrease the size of the pattern by choosing object transform scale. I’m going to make this larger, so I’ll turn preview on make sure to deselect transform objects and let’s make it actually 400 percent this time and click, OK. If you think that there’s a problem with your pattern, visibly, it looks like this is out, but when I zoom in, you can’t actually see the steps on the design. And so that’s just an illustrator issue that we’re seeing now. If you want to recolor this pattern, that, too is simplicity itself. Make sure to have this rectangle that’s filled with the pattern selected and go here to the recolor artwork tool. Now I’m working with illustrator CC 2020 it’s been updated recently and the Recolor artwork tool has a bit more functionality. But basically you can do the same things with it. The first thing we need to do is to map black because right now black isn’t changeable. So I’m going to click here and say yes. I do want to add a color here, and I’ve got a little arrow between them. That’s important because it means that black is also editable. Now I’m going to double click on this and go and select a color to use, so I’m going to choose a blue color, and now now that I’ve kicked black away from being black, It’s always useful to do that because when you go to the edit option now it’s going to be really clear, as to which of these handles you can drag around, and it’s just going to make it a little bit easier for you to change up your pattern so here we can select colors for our pattern and the advantage of doing that through the Recolor artwork tool. Is that as soon as I click. OK, watch up here Because illustrator adds another copy, so we’ve actually got a brand new pattern. This is the original black and red pattern, and now we’ve got a new pattern that is its own pattern Swatch in these new colors, so we haven’t had to create a brand new pattern Swatch. That’s all been taken care of automatically by illustrator. Now, in a similar way, you could make patterns of uneven width lines before we finish up. I have more illustrator training at skillsharecom. When you sign up for skillshare, you get access to thousands of classes there, including over 250 of mine in the description below, is a skillshare coupon for you, which is at least as good as the current skillshare offer and typically, mine will be even better. I also have illustrator training at Udemycom and there’s a referral link for every one of my courses there in the description below, Please feel free to share these with family friends and co-workers. I hope this video has been of help to you and that you have learned something about illustrator of which you were previously unaware. If you did enjoy the video, please give it A thumbs up, hit the subscribe button and the notification bell and you’ll be alerted when new videos are released until next time. My name is Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me here on my Youtube channel.