From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

920 Turning a blend into a repeating pattern

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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920 Turning a blend into a repeating pattern

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- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now, if you're into quilting and I mean these days who isn't, then you may be familiar with the pattern called Light in the Valley. I was so taken with this pattern that I lovingly recreated it pixel for pixel inside Photoshop. But here's the thing, quilt patterns, much like sheet music, architectural drawings, and other original forms of authorship, are protected by copyright. Now famously Light in the Valley was created by Mary Byler, who in accordance with Amish tradition, never protected her copyright, but then she later sold that copyright to a for-profit company. And well, we all know how that goes. And so notice that the Light and the Valley pattern is based on a lantern tile, specifically the type one onion that I explored a couple of weeks ago, back in episode 914. Which is why I switched the type one onion for a type three scallop in order to create this pattern in Adobe Illustrator. This is not a quilt pattern. This is an original piece of vector-based art. I hold the copyright, but I'm not going to enforce it if you decide to recreate it for yourself, or for that matter, turn it into a quilt and auction it off at a volunteer fire company mud sale. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, so here's our very colorful seamlessly repeating tile pattern open inside Illustrator and here's the object at the heart of it all, this six color blend. Now, anytime you want to create a repeating pattern inside Illustrator you want to start things off right off the bat by figuring out the dimensions of your pattern tile, which is to say, how big is your central object? And to figure that out, I'll make sure that my black arrow tool is active up here at the top of the toolbox, and then I'll double-click anywhere inside the blend in order to enter the isolation mode. And you'll know that you're in that mode when you see up here in the top left corner of the window the word Blend next to its layer name, which in our case is colors. All right, now I'll just go ahead and click on this top object in order to select it independently of the rest of the blend, and then I'll go up to the Window menu and choose Info. And that's going to bring up a panel that will tell you the width and height of this specific path outline. And so in our case, the width is 708 points and the height is 472 points. So what you want to do is just write those values down, because we're going to be coming back to them in just a few moments. Go ahead and close the panel and then press the Escape key in order to escape out of that isolation mode. Now, click inside the object again to select the entire blend, and now we need to duplicate it a bunch of times. And for this to work you want the bounding box to be turned off. And so go up to the View menu and notice this command right here. If it reads Hide Bounding Box then you want to choose the command in order to get rid of the bounding box. If it reads Show Bounding Box, then do not choose the command, because the bounding box is already hidden. All right, so I'll just go ahead and Escape out of there. And now I'll drag this blend by this left-hand point right here, this left-hand anchor point, until it snaps into alignment with the right point. And so you want to make sure you're seeing that white snap cursor, at which point press and hold the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and release in order to create a duplicate of that object. All right, now click on the original, once again and drag it by its right anchor point over to the left until it, once again, snaps into alignment. So notice that snap. We're going from a black arrow cursor to a white one. That's what we want. And then you want to press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac, so that you're seeing a double white cursor. At which point, go ahead and release. All right, now I'll click off the object, so that you can see that we have an obvious seam over here on the right hand side of the document, as well as the left side as well, and that's because we're seeing the intersection of two different blends. What we need to do is move another version of the blend in front of that region. And so go ahead and select that original guy, once again and drag it by its top anchor point down to this location right here, you should see a white snap cursor, once again. At which point, press and hold the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and release. Now notice that doesn't get rid of the problem and that's because this object is not actually in front. And so what you need to do is right-click anywhere inside the document window, choose Arrange, and then choose Bring to Front, or you have that keyboard shortcut of Control + Shift + right bracket here on the PC, that's Command + Shift + right bracket on the Mac. And that'll go ahead and eliminate that seam, like so. Now we need to get rid of this seam over here. So go ahead and drag this top anchor point and drop it here at this location. Notice my white snapping cursor, then I'll press the Alt key or the Option key on a Mac before I drop it, then I'll drop it, and that will create a copy of that blend. And we need one more, so go ahead and drag this top anchor point. Notice the seam down here at the bottom of the screen, need to get rid of it. So I'll drag this top anchor point down to this location, wait for a snap ,and then press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac, and drop that guy into place. Now, if you're curious about whether you're snapping everything into the proper position, then go up to the View menu and choose the Outline command, which has a keyboard shortcut of Control + Y here on the PC or Command + Y on the Mac, longstanding shortcut. But notice now that we're just seeing the outlines it's very clear that I have an absolute match. If one of your paths was off just a little bit, like so, then you're going to mess up the entire pattern. All right, so I'll go ahead and undo that move, because things are working out nicely. And then I'll switch back to the preview mode by using that same keyboard shortcut of Control + Y here on the PC or Command + Y on the Mac. All right, now for the best results we need to fill in this white gap up here at the top of the document. So go ahead and select that original guy, once again, and then notice this anchor point right here, the one that's aligned to this blend, so go ahead and make sure your cursor is positioned over this anchor point and then drag it upward, directly up, like so, until it snaps into alignment. Once again, you'll see that white snap cursor, then you want to press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and release. Now may look like it's in the wrong position, because after all, we have a discrepancy in the alignment between the top of this blend and the bottom of this one. But remember that we have these very thick strokes that are filling in the gaps. Problem with this guy is that it's in front. We don't want that, so right-click anywhere in the document window, choose Arrange, and this time choose Send to Back, which has a keyboard shortcut of Control + Shift + left bracket here on the PC, that's Command + Shift + left bracket on the Mac. And that'll send that guy to the back of the stack, like so. All right, now we need to fill in the remaining gaps on the right and left hand sides. So you want to locate that specific anchor point, once again, notice it's right there. It appears that the apex of this path outline. So we'll go ahead and click on this guy, once again, and drag it by this anchor point down to this position, so that it's snapping into alignment with the top of that blend that's under my cursor. You're looking for a white snap cursor, at which point press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and release in order to create that guy. And now let's just duplicate this one again by dragging it by that same anchor point right there over to this location, so that it snaps into alignment with the top of the blend beneath my cursor. You should see a white snap cursor, at which point press and hold the Alt or Option key on the Mac and release, like so. And then, just to make sure everything's where it needs to be, go ahead and press Control + Shift + A or Command + Shift + A on the Mac to de-select your artwork, and then press Control + Y or Command + Y on a Mac in order to switch to the outline mode and you should see that every single one of the path outlines is in the proper place. The only spot where they get kind of close to each other right here is toward the middle of the artwork. Also notice, if you take a look in the Layers panel at the preview of the colors layer, you should see a total of one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine of these little blends. At which point, press Control + Y or Command + Y on the Mac in order to switch back to the preview mode. All right, now, assuming that the colors layer is the only one that's visible here inside the Layers panel, press Control + A or Command + A on the Mac to select all of the artwork, then go up to the Object menu, choose Pattern and choose Make, and that will switch you to the Pattern Editing Mode. You may see this warning right here that's telling you how things work, just click OK. And now what we want to do is start off by naming the layer here inside the Pattern Options panel. And so I'm just going to call this guy ice tones. You want to leave Tile Type for this guy set to Grid. So just the standard Grid option. And then you want to change the Width and Height values to those same values that we saw inside the Info panel. So the Width value should be 708 points and then the Height value should be 472 points. Now, if you look at what's happening inside the document window, you may think, Deke, this isn't working out at all. Well, that's because we need to change the Overlap settings. So I'm going to select this guy, Right in Front, for starters, and then I'll select this guy, Bottom in Front, as well. And for whatever reason, that gives us the exact effect we're looking for. At which point, go ahead and click the Done button up here at the top of the screen in order to create that pattern, which you'll see, by the way, in the Swatches panel. Notice that right there. All right, now I'm going to zoom out a little bit and I'm going to turn off that colors layer and I'll create a new layer by dropping down to the little plus icon, in previous versions of the software it appears as a little page, whatever it looks like, Alt or Option + click on it to force the display of the Layer Options dialog box. And I'll just go ahead and call this guy pattern and then I'll change its color to any old thing really. Grass Green is going to work out great. At which point I'll click OK. Now go up to the View menu and turn on your Smart Guides, if they're not already on, then you want to select the Rectangle Tool from the Shape Tool fly-out menu and drag from one corner of that red bleed boundary to the other, as you see me doing here, so that you're covering the entire art board. Now, in my case, the rectangle is stroked, but it's not filled. So notice over here in the Swatches panel that my stroke is active. And so I'll just go ahead and set it to none. And then I'll switch to the fill just by clicking in that little fill icon there, and I'll change it to ice tones, which is the pattern I just got done creating. All right, I'm going to zoom in by pressing Control + zero or Command + zero on the Mac, and then I'll switch to my Scale Tool, which you can get by pressing the S key, and then you want to press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac in order to scale the artwork. And notice that I've set the Uniform value to 50%. The thing is, I don't want to transform the object, I just want to transform the patterns. So turn this guy off, turn this guy on, turn on the Preview check box, and you'll see the pattern scale on-screen. And you can scale it to any extent you want. I can change the uniform value to 33% instead. But whatever you do, you should see that pattern repeat all together seamlessly. At which point I'll click OK to accept that change. All right, now I'll press Control + Shift + A or Command + Shift + A on a Mac to de-select the artwork. And that is how you turn your six color blend into a seamlessly repeating tile pattern here inside Illustrator. If you're a member of LinkedIn Learning I have a follow-up movie in which we take our current pattern, which I'm calling ice folds, kind of boring, and we're going to line up the colors and turn it into this warm variation that I'm calling fire beneath the ice. If you're looking forward to next week, I'll be showing you how Illustrator calculates the radius of a freeform polygon. Have I mentioned that I'm a nerd? Deke's Techniques, each and every week, keep watching.

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