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

748 Combining complementary patterns

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

748 Combining complementary patterns

- [Instructor] In this movie I'll show you how to design a complementary tile pattern that we'll assign to the background for the cow. And hopefully along the way, I'll communicate a few tips and tricks for working with tile patterns here inside Illustrator. Alright, so I'll switch to the document from the previous movie. Notice that I have this Swatches panel up on screen. If you're not seeing yours, go to the Window menu and choose this guy right here, the Swatches command. Do not choose the command, however, if it has a check mark in front of it because that will hide the panel. Alright, now what you want to do is make sure that nothing's selected at this point. And then go ahead and select that tile pattern called oranges from the previous movie. Click on it, and then we'll create a copy of it by clicking on the little page icon at the bottom of the panel. And I'm gonna call this guy greens because that's what it's gonna be and I'll click OK. And so the idea here is anytime you wanna make significant changes to a tile pattern, go ahead and duplicate it up front, and that way you'll always have access to the original. And another thing to bear in mind is that these tile patterns are saved as part of the active document, they are not saved globally. Alright, so having created that new pattern, I'll go ahead and double click on its swatch in order to enter the pattern editing mode. Alright, now I just wanna replace each one of the colors inside the pentagons two group with their corresponding colors inside the pentagons one group. And so I'm gonna do that by selecting this guy right here, leed shape two, so the brightest shade of orange, and then I'll go up to the control panel and click on this icon, select similar objects. And by the way, if for some reason that doesn't work, as it didn't in my case, then click this down pointing arrowhead and choose either All or Fill Color. But one way or other, you should ultimately select all the shapes that are filled with that shade of orange. And then all you need to do is make sure the fill's active here in the Swatches panel and then click on leed shape, that green color right there. And next, you wanna press Control + Shift + A, or Command + Shift + A on the Mac, to deselect those shapes. Next, go ahead and select second two, right there, then click on select similar object and go ahead and replace it with second, like so, and then press Control + Shift + A, or Command + Shift + A on the Mac, to deselect the objects. Now recall, that you can go ahead and grab a swatch, such as third right here, and then drag it onto its corresponding swatch below. Notice that if you just go ahead and drag and drop, you'll move that swatch to a different location. Obviously that's not what I want. So I'll go ahead and undo. Or you can press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac. At which point your tiny little fist cursor gets a plus sign next to it and then if you drop, you go ahead and replace the definition of that swatch. Now that's not what we want because that's going to affect the cow inside the actual document. Now bear in mind, all of the swatches that we're seeing here inside the pattern editing mode are part of the document itself, which is why we're still seeing that same title up here in the Title tab. And I mention that, not only because you don't wanna make these kinds of modifications, sometimes you do, but in this case we don't. But also because you don't wanna think gosh, I'm done editing a pattern, I think I'll close it by clicking on the close button up here, because that'll actually close your document. And notice I've made a mess of my cow. So I'm just gonna click the cancel button 'cause I don't want to make that modification and then I'll press Control + Z, or Command + Z on a Mac, in order to undo the modification of that swatch. So when you make a big mistake in the pattern editing mode, don't panic, just undo. Alright, so I'm just gonna click on that third two swatch right there and then I'll click on this icon select similar objects in order to select everything that's filled with that specific swatch. And I'll switch it out like so, then I'll press Control + Shift + A, or Command + Shift + A on a Mac to deselect. I'll go ahead and grab this orange right there, fourth two, click on select similar objects, and go ahead and switch it to this guy, fourth. And then click off to deselect is another way to work. I'll go ahead and select fifth two, and click on the icon up there in the control panel, switch it to this guy, fifth. Then click off the shapes to deselect 'em. And if you like, you can just click on one of the shapes that's still filled with this kind of muddy brown right here. And then click that icon, select similar objects, or else you'll recolor that one object independently of the others and then set it to sixth, like so. And we end up with this effect here. Alright, now we're done. So all you need to do is click on the Done button. Don't close the document, not a good idea. Click the Done button or you can just press the Escape key. Now I have saved my changes to the tile pattern. You can see that here inside the Swatches panel. However, I have not applied this swatch to the background. So I'll just go ahead and click on a background, which is nothing more than a giant rectangle, by the way. And then I'll change its fill to that tile pattern, which ends up makin' the tiles too big and they're not at the angle I'm looking for and so always remember that if you want to transform your pattern, the best way to do it is not using the rotate and scale tools. They do work, by the way, they just don't work all that well. What you wanna do instead is go up to the Effect menu. Choose Distort and Transform, and choose Transform in order to bring up this wonderful feature right there. And notice, incidentally, another thing you can do because you're working with a tile pattern is you can stretch it. So I could leave the horizontal value set to 100% and take the vertical value by itself down to 50%. And now notice if I turn on the preview checkbox, well, I've actually squished the rectangle along with the pattern. But if I turn off this checkbox, Transform Objects, then I just squish the pattern by itself. And notice you can do some big time squishing if you want. And then if you start rotating the squished tiles around, you end up getting this kind of grass effect right here. I don't want that much squishing. So I'll just go ahead and change that vertical value back to 50% and then I'll set the angle value, the rotate angle, to 44 degrees like so. And that's because I don't want this background to look like grass, I want it to look like corn. This is a corn fed cow. Alright, so I'll go ahead and click OK to accept those changes right there. And the final thing I wanna do is recolor these dark shades of brown inside the cow, not very satisfied with them. And because I'm working with a global swatch, I can just change the swatch and everything's gonna update. And the reason I know it's a global swatch is because it's got a little white wedge in its bottom right corner. However, if I go ahead and click on this guy thinking I'm gonna double click, I'm going to recolor the fill, which is not what I want. However, if I switch to the appearance panel, you can see that I still have that transform effect. And so if I were to switch the fill back to that greens pattern, then everything's gonna work out great. Alright, I'll press Control + Shift + A, or Command + Shift + A on a Mac, to deselect that big rectangle and then I'll double click on that sixth two swatch right there in order to bring up the Swatch Options dialog box. Notice the global checkbox is turned on, leave it that way. And switch the color mode to HSB. And then I just turned on a preview checkbox so I can keep track of what I'm doing. And I took the hue value up to 30 degrees, like so, by pressing Shift up here. And then I tabbed over to the saturation value and set it to 70%. And you can see these modifications are being applied in the background. And so as I modify this swatch, those changes are being applied to both of the tile patterns that employ that swatch as well, which is a really great thing. And now I'll take the brightness value up to 100%. And we end up with this much brighter shade of orange, at which point I'll click OK in order to accept that change. And that's how you create a complementary tile pattern for the background for your cow, which seems like a pretty specific skill to learn, but there's all kinds of stuff going on anytime you're at work inside Adobe Illustrator.

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