From the course: Illustrator One-on-One: Mastery

Creating a pattern - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator One-on-One: Mastery

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Creating a pattern

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- [Narrator] Now there are two ways to create a repeating pattern inside Illustrator. As usual, I'm going to show you both ways so that you can choose your poison. Either way, you need to select the path outlines or text objects that you want to include in your pattern. And so I'll go ahead and partially marquee these objects in order to select them with the black arrow tool. To pull up method number one, you need the Swatches panel to be up on screen. If it isn't, then go to the Window menu and choose the Swatches command. Next, go ahead and drag your selected objects and drop them into the Swatches panel. Do not drop them in a group because Illustrator will ignore you. Rather, just drop the pattern where you want it to appear in the general list. And notice that it comes up unnamed, or at least it has a generic name. If you want to change the name of your pattern, then you can double click on it in order to switch to the pattern editing mode. Or another way to work is to select the swatch like so, and notice that that messes everything up because I have selected objects that are now filled with that pattern. That's not what I want, so I'll press Control + Z or Command + Z on the Mac to undo that change. I'll click off the objects, then I'll click on the pattern swatch to select it. And now I'll click on the fly out menu icon in the top right corner of the Swatches panel, and I'll choose this guy, Swatch Options. And the advantage of working this way is rather than bringing up the full pattern editing mode, which we'll see in just a moment, you get this dialog box that allows you to change the name and nothing more. And so I'm just going to call this guy, let's say, drag-and-drop pattern, even though I cannot type, and then I will click OK. And that goes ahead and renames the pattern as we're seeing here. Another way to work is to, once again, marquee those path outlines and then go to the Object menu, drop down to the Pattern command and choose Make. And that will take you into the pattern editing mode, which is the same thing that will happen if you double click on a pattern swatch here, inside the Swatches panel, at which point Illustrator welcomes you to the pattern editing mode, and it tells you that a new pattern has been added to the Swatches panel. You can safely go ahead and turn on the Don't Show Again check box, and then click OK. And now notice that you have a ton of options available to you for modifying your pattern, here, inside the Pattern Options dialog box, including this Name option. And so I'll go ahead and click on the word Name in order to highlight that field. And I'll go ahead and call this guy cosmic cube, and then I'll press the enter key, or the return key on the Mac, to accept that change. Now I want to direct your attention to these options up here in the top left corner of the screen. You can save a copy. We'll take a look at that in a later movie. You can cancel out if you like, just by clicking the Cancel button, in which case Illustrator will delete this new swatch from the Swatches panel, or you can accept your changes by clicking Done. Another option is to press the escape key, which is going to go ahead and take you out of the pattern editing mode and accept your changes. So clicking Done is the same as pressing the escape key. And so I'll just go ahead and press escape and notice that we now have a new swatch, here, inside the Swatches panel. All right, now to see what that pattern looks like, I'll go ahead and bring up the New Layer dialogue box by alt clicking on this little page icon. That's an option click on the Mac. Or if you loaded my D keys, you can just press Control + Shift + Alt + L or Command + Shift + Option + L on the Mac. And I'll go ahead and call this guy pattern, and I'll change the color to violet just because it goes well with the other layer colors, and then I'll click OK. And now I'll zoom out so that I can see the bleed boundary and I'll go ahead and select my rectangle tool, which you can get by pressing the M key. I'll go up to the View menu and make sure smart guides are turned on. In my case, they're not. So I'll go ahead and choose the command. And then I'll drag from one corner of the red bleed boundary to the other in order to create this big rectangle that is already filled with one of my patterns. It's actually filled with this guy right here, drag-and-drop pattern. If I wanted to switch the fill to my cosmic cube pattern, then I would just make sure my field is active here in the Swatches panel. And then I would go ahead and click on that pattern. And so you can see, they both look exactly the same. Now you may wonder what in the world is going on with this guy in the background. Well, these white regions are actually transparent. And so we're seeing through the pattern layer to the circle cube layer in the background. And so I'll go ahead and turn that layer off, and we end up with this effect here. And now I'll de-select that rectangle by pressing Control + Shift + A or Command + Shift + A on the Mac. And so those are the two different ways to create a pattern inside of Illustrator. They both give you a pattern swatch, here, inside the Swatches panel, that you can assign either to a fill or to a stroke.

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