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

747 Applying and modifying a tile pattern

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

747 Applying and modifying a tile pattern

- [Instructor] In this movie, we'll take our Type 15, perfectly tessellating, irregular convex pentagons that we've converted into an automatically repeating rectangular tile pattern, here, inside Illustrator, and we'll use that pattern in order to fill this cow, which comes to us from the Dreamstime image library, about which you could learn more, and get some great deals at dreamstime.com/deke.php, and we'll end up with this final effect, here. Because, after all, it's one thing to fill a rectangle with a rectangular tile pattern. It's something else to fill a custom shape. And along the way, I'll show you how you apply custom modifications to your tile patterns, once again, here inside Illustrator. Now, you can see I've already modified things by turning all of my blue global swatches to shades of green. So that's something I've done up front, just to save us a little bit of time. Now, all we wanna do is take this tile pattern, this guy, right here, Type 15, inside the swatches panel, and move it into the cow illustration. And the easiest way to do that is to just go ahead and select something that's already filled with that tile, so I'll just go ahead and grab that rectangle, and I'll go up to the edit menu and choose the copy command, or you can just press Control-C, or Command-C on the Mac. And then I'll switch over to the cow illustration. I want you to notice the swatches panel here, it doesn't have any tile patterns, and it doesn't contain any global swatches, either. But as soon as I go up to the edit menu and choose the paste command, or you can press Control-V, or Command-V on the Mac, I'll get this alert message, which is telling me that I'm trying to paste to a locked layer, which is not what I want. So I'll click no, and I'll go ahead and get rid of that layer, just by dropping down to the tiny trash icon at the bottom of the layers panel and clicking on it, and I'll click Yes to say yes, I wanna get rid of that layer, and then I'll try pasting again, this time, just by pressing Control-V, or Command-V on the Mac, at which point I see my tile pattern inside of this rectangle. And I'm also gonna see a whole bunch of global swatches, as indicated by these white wedges, in their bottom-right corners, as well as this tile pattern. And so, any time you paste an object, it's gonna bring its tile pattern along with. All right, I no longer need this rectangle, so I'll just press the Backspace key, or the Delete key, to get rid of it, and then I will select the cow, just by clicking on it with my black arrow tool. Notice my fill is active, here, inside the swatches panel, and so I'll just go ahead and click on that Type 15 pattern in order to apply it to the cow. Now, I don't want my pattern to be that big, and I wanna rotate it, as well, and you can do that, if you like, using the scale and rotate tools, but there's a better way to work, which is to apply both modifications at the same time, entirely dynamically, using the transform command. And so I'll go up to the effect menu, choose distort and transform, and choose what might be my favorite feature in all of Illustrator, it's totally awesome, the transform command, which brings up the transform effect dialog box. And then, I'll go ahead and turn on the preview checkbox so I can see what I'm doing. And recall, before, when we were trying to figure out the angle of our pentagons, that I had you rotate the pentagons 180 minus 150 degrees, which turns out to be 30 degrees. And notice that produces a little bit of a problem. It rotates not only the pattern, but rather conspicuously, it rotates the cow, as well. I don't want that, so I'll turn off the transform objects checkbox. You wanna leave transform patterns turned on, by the way. But that actually compounds the problem. It doesn't reset the pattern to the way it looked originally, when we created it manually, so what you wanna do here, is change that angle value to negative, and then press the Tab key, and notice that we have now regained our original orientation. Or at least take my word for it. It may not be all that obvious, at first. All right, now I wanna scale the pattern, so I'll go ahead and take both the horizontal and vertical values down to 50%, like so, and then I'll click OK. Now, notice that I have a pretty jagged preview. I think that's gonna show up in the video, but if I start zooming in, there's a chance that things will get smoother. In my case, that chance is not working out at all, so I'll just go ahead and zoom back out to 100%. If this happens to you, if you get a jagged preview, or you see a few seams, then what you wanna do is go up to the view menu, and switch to this command, "Preview on CPU". Sometimes the GPUs can't handle it, other times they can. In your case, things may look absolutely great on the GPU, but in my case, I have to switch over. And then, what I'm gonna do, just to offset this cow that much better, I'm gonna go up to the effect menu, choose stylize, and choose drop shadow, in order to bring up this dialog box. These values are fine, 100% for opacity, five, five, five, all the way down, a color of black. Click OK, and I end up with this fetching drop shadow. All right, so that's looking pretty great, but let's say, instead of having these alternating rows of orange and green tiles, I want all of the tiles to be orange. In that case, I could either modify my existing tile pattern, or I could create a new one. And generally speaking, it's good to get in the habit of creating new tile patterns as you make modifications. And so the first thing I'm gonna do, just so I don't mess up this cow, is deselect it by pressing Control-Shift-A, or Command-Shift-A on the Mac, and then, with that tile pattern selected, here inside the swatches panel, I'll create a copy of it by clicking on this little page icon, down here, at the bottom of the panel. That'll bring up the new swatch dialog box, at which point I'll call this guy "oranges", and I'll click OK. Now, notice how my global swatches all came in. However, they did not come in the way they were organized in my original document. So notice that we have one group called "Pentagons 1", another called "Pentagons 2", and they're arranged in a specific order, starting with lead, then second, then third, and so forth. In order to make the modifications I intend to make, here, we're gonna need them to be organized that way, as well. And so I'm gonna grab these green swatches, right here, by clicking on one, and Shift-clicking on the other, in order to select that entire range, and then I'll click on this little folder icon in order to create a new color group, and I'm just gonna call this guy "Pentagons 1", as we saw before. And then I'll grab my orange swatches by clicking on one, Shift-clicking on the other, and clicking the folder icon, and I'll call this guy "Pentagons 2", and click OK. All right, now I need to kinda drag him around. This is a pain in the neck, but it's something I gotta do. So I'll move second to the second position. I'll find third, right there, move it to the third position. I'll find fourth, move it there. This guy's fifth, move it here. The last guy is sixth. You see where I'm going? Now, I'll grab lead shape two, drag it to the beginning. I so apologize on Illustrator's behalf, for this. It seems like it would just go ahead and bring everything in in the proper order. I might be missing something. You never know, so I shouldn't denigrate the software. Now, everything is where it needs to be. So it didn't really take that long. All right, now what I wanna do is double-click on this guy, "oranges", in order to switch to the pattern editing mode. And now, I'm gonna select this green shape, right here, or I'd like to. Unfortunately, everything's grouped together. At least, unfortunately from this perspective, so I'll select everything by pressing Control-A, or Command-A on the Mac, and then I will ungroup everything by going to the object menu and choosing the ungroup command, or you can just press Control-Shift-G, or Command-Shift-G on the Mac. Then I'll click off to deselect the shapes, and I'll click on this guy, which is filled with the lightest and brightest shade of green, "Lead Shape", that's the name of the swatch. I wanna select all the shapes that are filled with that color, and so I'll go up to this icon, select similar objects, make sure that it's set to "All", by the way, and then just click on it in order to select all those guys. And now, you just wanna make sure the fill's active, here, inside the swatches panel, and we're gonna set it to the darkest brown, which is sixth. So we're gonna switch things around, a little bit. Now, another way to work, by the way, just so you know, I'll click off the shapes to deselect 'em, is to say, you know, I wanna replace everything that's colored with second, with this color, right here, fifth two. So you could grab this guy and drag him over while pressing the Alt key, or the Option key on the Mac, and then release, and that will go ahead and replace that global swatch with this one, right here. So you'll now have two copies of that same swatch, and you'll change all of the objects colored with that swatch, as well. However, that does permanently ruin that swatch, which is not what I want, but it's a heck of a trick. So I'll just go ahead and press Control-Z, or Command-Z on the Mac, in order to undo that change, and I'll select that swatch. So nothing is selected inside the illustration, I'm just grabbing the swatch, right there, clicking on it, and then clicking on that select similar objects icon, once again, to select all the objects that are filled with that swatch. And now I'll just change it to fifth two, like so, then I'll grab this guy, click on that icon, select similar objects, go ahead and switch it to fourth two, go ahead and grab this guy, which is fourth, the original fourth. Don't click on it when the objects are selected. I've made a terrible mistake, so I'm gonna use this top-secret feature called undo, which I get by pressing Control-Z a couple of times, and that finally gets us back to where I wanna be. I've gotta click off the shapes to deselect 'em, and then grab that guy, and then click on that icon, and then select that color swatch. So don't do what I did, that was a terrible mistake. But click off the objects to deselect 'em. I'll grab that guy, right there, fourth, click on select similar objects, switch them all to third two, right there, click off the objects to deselect 'em, grab this guy, right there, fifth. So not much left. Go ahead and click on that icon, up there, in the control panel, and switch 'em to second two, and then click off. And finally, we'll grab this guy, which is sixth, and click select similar objects. You've gotta do that if you wanna change all the shapes, and then select lead shape two, like so, that is the swatch, here, inside the swatches panel. And now that we've changed all the fills, I wanna make one more change. I'm gonna press Control-A, or Command-A on the Mac, in order to select all of these objects, and then I'm gonna go up to the second swatch, on the far left side of the control panel, click on it, and change it to "None", and that will get rid of all the strokes. And now, I will accept my changes, either by clicking on the Done button, or you can just press the Escape key, in order to escape out of the pattern editing mode, and save your changes. Now, you might think, well, it doesn't really look like you saved anything, and that's because the cow is still linked to the original tile pattern, Type 15. So what I need to do is click on the cow to select it, and then change its fill to "oranges", and we'll end up with this effect, here. And notice that I've maintained all of my transformations, and that's because I made those transformations using a dynamic application of the transform effect, which you can access, here, inside the appearance panel. So notice the pattern is still scaled by 50%, and rotated to the tune of negative 30 degrees. All right, so I'll just go ahead and cancel out, and I'll click off the cow to deselect it. And that's how you apply your tile pattern to a custom shape, as well as make a few real-word stylistic modifications, here, inside Illustrator.

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