Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to this video tutorial today we’re looking at creating a textured pattern in Illustrator, a pattern that has some texture built into it before we begin. I have more illustrator training at Skillshare comm. When you sign up for skill show you get access to thousands of classes there, including over 250 of mine in the description below, is a skill share coupon for you, which is at least as good as the current skill share offer and typically, mine will be better. I also have Illustrator training at Udemy Calm and you’ll find a referral link for each of those courses in the description below, please feel free to share these with family, friends and co-workers. Let’s swing back to illustrator, and I’m going to create a pattern in Illustrator, so I’m going to make this as a series of circles. They’re going to have a black fill, but no stroke at all, just doing a drag out a few circles, make some a little smaller than the others to make my duplicates. I’m just holding down the alt or option Key as I drag a duplicate away now. I’ll select everything I’m going to make at the pattern using the pattern make tool, which is in Illustrator, all the CC versions, as well as CS6, choose object pattern. And then make you see this dialog click. OK now! The first thing to do is to check and make sure that the width and height of your pattern tile, they don’t have to be the same, but they do need to be values that don’t have things after the decimal point, so they have to be whole numbers right now. Mines a square, but it doesn’t have to be that so. I’m just going to make it not a square, so I’m making sure that this option here is not selected so I can change each value independently. I’m going to make the width 550 and the height 600 so making it not a square. I’m going to zoom out so I can see things more clearly, and I’ll just increase the number of versions of the pattern here so that we can see it and I’ll turn the artboard off as well. Just give us a better look at the pattern, so this is going to be the size of my pattern tile and it’s 550 by 600 It can be anything whole numbers, though. Please, so once you’ve made it 550 by 600 you might find that things are overlapping, so you might find that you sort of forced some circles to be in the wrong place or all you’ll do is go and move them in to a better place. Once you’ve got the pattern that you like, and I’m pretty happy with this, You’ll just click done. We don’t need our circles any longer, and it would be nice to get our artboard’s back, so I’ll click view and then show artboard’s. I’ll zoom in by pressing ctrl or command 0 and now we’re going to get our texture and I already have a texture that I’ve downloaded from a site called Vector Easy calm. You can get free textures here and I downloaded one of these sort of gritty grunge ones. It came with six textures in the file, so what I did was just turn off visibility of five of them, and we’re going to focus on this one before I take it to this document. I’m going to change its dimensions, the dimensions of this texture to match the dimensions of my pattern. Swatch, which was 550 pixels wide and 600 tall, so with it selected. I’m going to go up here. Make sure that this icon again is unlocked. It’s not selected because we want to be able to change the width and height individually, so the width is 550 and the height is 600 We’re going to copy this with edit copy. We’ll go back to this document and we’ll paste it with edit paste or you can use ctrl or command. V now we’re going to move this into the top corner, so we know where it is out of these nine boxes. You’ll select the top left one and then set the X and Y values to zero that just puts the texture in the top corner and we’re going to do the same with our pattern, so I’m going to drag our pattern out of the pattern Swatch. Now it comes with lots of other little bits and pieces. That’s because this is the way pattern swatches. Look, it’s this bit in the middle. That is our pattern. Swatch, let’s go to the layer’s panel and just see what’s happening here. So this is the group here that contains our pattern. If we open it up, you’ll see that the very end or the very bottom of this is what’s called a no fill. No stroke rectangle, it’s a rectangle. That’s no fill and no stroke, and it marks out the area that our pattern comprises well. What we’re going to do is take a duplicate of it. We’re just going to drag it on to the new icon here, so we’ve got two of these, and we’re going to move one just above absolutely everything and then we’re going to select everything. We’re going to select the copy. No fill, no stroke rectangle, plus our group and then we’ll right-click it and choose make clipping mask. You can also get to that by choosing object and then clipping mask mink and what that does is. It uses that second, no fill, no stroke rectangle to mark out the area that comprises our seamless repeating pattern and this we’re going to place immediately over the top of our texture and we’re going to confirm that it’s in the right position, which it’s not at the moment we’ve got its top left corner selected. It should be at zero zero. So now we have our texture in place at the moment, it’s underneath our pattern. Well, we’re going to target the texture here and we’re going to cut it from the document with edit cut, then we’ll select our pattern and we’re going to choose window and then transparency because we’re going to make what’s called a transparency mask, which will allow us to knock holes in our pattern. So with our pattern selected, we’re going to click here on make mask. We’re going to target this box here and everything’s gone. White, that’s just fine, that’s exactly as it should be with this box targeted. We’re going to paste our pattern in, so we’re going to use edit paste in place. It’s critical that you use edit paste in place because that’s going to put it back exactly where it came from. Then we’ll go and click on clip to disable that and check and see what we’ve got and you should be seeing white marks or white through your pattern piece because that’s the texture eating a hole in your pattern. If it doesn’t, you can try inverting it If you might need to do that, depending on the type of texture you’re using in our case. I’m going to turn invert mask off because that’s showing me exactly what I want to say. I’ll reselect this object and this is where if you’re going to make a mistake as where you’re going to make it have a look here In the layer’s panel, you’ll see that we’re working in an opacity mask. The layer’s panel doesn’t look the way it should, and that’s because we are working with this opacity mask over here. If you want to get back to regular editing of your document, you have to click on this option first. Click on this box to target it. See how the layer’s palette changes. If you can’t edit your document properly, the reason is you didn’t. Go back and select the original object in the transparency panel. So you could do that. If you need to get back to working in your document, so now we have a pattern Swatch. If we have a look in the layer’s panel, we’ve got all the objects we need and we’ve got a no fill, no stroke rectangle at the very bottom of everything, so we’re going to drag and drop this into the swatches panel and what you should see is what we’re seeing here is. This Swatch should fill up this little box in here since we don’t need this any longer. I’m just going to delete it now. I’ll create a rectangle the size of my artboard just to test this out. I’ll make sure the fill is targeted. Go to the swatches panel and let’s fill it with our pattern, and now I’ll scale it so we can see it more clearly. Object, transform scale. I’m going to bring the pattern down to 25% But of course I only want to transform the pattern and not the box that it’s in. So I’ll click, OK? Now you might be seeing some tiny hair lines through this. This is illustrator. It’s not in the pattern. So when I zoom in the hair lines are disappearing or they’re moving, and if they move or disappear, then you’re just fine if they stay in the same place. It’s because you’ve got a problem with your pattern. So that’s how you can create a textured pattern. Swatch in Illustrator. The success is going to be measured by how the pattern looks in the first place. It works really well on a pattern like this because all the elements are sort of separate from each other. If you have a pattern that pretty much fills the entire pattern Swatch and it’s solid, and if your texture is not going to tile really nicely, then you might have difficulties. This texture is going to tile reasonably. Well, let me just show you when I place it. Side-by-side you can see that there are not obvious lines in the texture and because it’s such a sort of spread out texture, it will work as a seamless tile, really, really well, but other textures may need some work to actually create them as a seamless tile before you can use them in the pattern, but I thought it was an interesting exercise to see how you could texture a pattern Swatch. I hope this video has been of help to you. If you enjoyed it, please give it a thumbs up, hit the subscribe button and that notification Bell and you’ll be alerted when new videos are released until next time my names. Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me here on my Youtube channel.