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

814 Creating a pattern of gobstoppers

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

Start my 1-month free trial

814 Creating a pattern of gobstoppers

“

we'll take our lonely cubical gobstopper and we'll turn it into this seamlessly repeating and I think fairly mind bending tile pattern. Now, the first thing we need to do is determine the size of our tile and you can do that by turning the guides layer back on here inside the layers panel and then selecting that layer to make it active. and make sure smart guides are turned on. In my case, they're not turned on so I'll go ahead and choose the command and then you want to bring up the shape tool fly out menu and select the polygon tool. Now, that tool by default draws hexagons and so I'm going to position my cursor at the intersection of those two guidelines and then I will drag out, like so, and if you're not seeing enough sides then you can press the up arrow key to add sides or the down arrow key to get rid of sides. We want six sides in all and then you want to move your cursor down until it snaps into alignment with the bottom edge of the artwork. Notice in the heads-up display, we can see a width value of 600 points. That's pretty straightforward and a height value, this one you need to write down, of 519.62 points. Those are the values we're looking for. And so after you get done drawing the shape you can convert it to a snapping guide by going up to the view menu, choosing guides and then choosing make guides, like so. All right now, at this point, it's probably a good idea to go ahead and write down that information. So I'll switch to my type tool which I can get by pressing the T key and then I'll click any old place to create some point type. I have copied those values in advance so I'll just press control V or command V on a Mac in order to paste them. Now, you can probably remember the width value of 600 points. That height value, however, is not a round number. So I'll go ahead and select it and then I'll press control C or command C on the Mac in order to copy that information. And now I'll press the escape key in order to switch back to the black arrow tool and I'll get ahead and nudge this guy upward a little bit. All right now, if you like, you can go ahead and turn off that guides layer. And now, click in the top right corner of the drawing layer in order to select everything on that layer and then go up to the object menu, choose pattern and choose make. Now, you may see this alert message which is just telling you that Illustrator has already added a swatch to the swatches panel. So, all you got to do is click okay there and then let's go ahead and name this guy gobstoppers because after all, that's what it is. And now you want to change the tile type to Hex by Column. That's the one with the flat top and bottom, just like the hexagon we drew a moment ago. Now, I'll set the width value to 600 points. Notice the height value is nearly correct but not quite and so with that height value selected, I'll press control V or command V on the Mac to paste the exact value we're looking for, which is 519.62, at which point everything lines up nicely. And so now, I'll just go ahead and click the done button up here at the top of the screen in order to create that pattern. Now, I'll create a new layer by dropping down to the little page icon at the bottom of the layers panel and I'll alt or option click on it to bring up the layers option dialog box. I'll go ahead and call this layer pattern and I will change the color to violet, although that's entirely up to you. All right, now I'll go ahead and click okay and I'll zoom out by pressing control minus or command minus on a Mac, and then I'll switch back to the rectangle tool and I will draw a rectangle that takes up the entire red bleed boundary. So in other words, the rectangle's going to be slightly larger than the art board. All right now, I don't want a stroke on the far left side of the control panel to none and then I'll click on the first swatch and I'll change it to our new pattern, gobstoppers, and we'll end up with this effect here. Now, at first it's going to look like you messed up and that's because we're seeing through these hex shaped holes right here to the drawing layer below. And so if you don't want to see that drawing layer, just turn it off, like so. The thing is, I really want to fill in these hex shape holes but before I do so, I'm going to go up to the window menu, and choose the appearance command to bring up the appearance panel so that I can select my fill right there and I want to reduce the size of the pattern by clicking on the FX icon down here at the bottom of the panel, then I'll choose distort and transform and finally, I'll choose the transform command and now you want to change both the horizontal and vertical scale values to 50%, like so. Turn on the preview checkbox. You'll see that you're reducing not only the size of the pattern but the rectangle as well. I don't want that, so I'll turn off the transform objects checkbox right here and I'll leave transform patterns turned on. And then I'll go ahead and click okay. All right, now to fill in the holes. I'm going to start by pressing control shift A or command shift A on the Mac to deselect that rectangle. And then I'll go to the swatches panel and I'll double click on that gobstopper swatch in order to switch back over to the pattern editing mode. And now what you want to do is press the V key to switch to the black arrow tool up here at the top of the tool box and go ahead and click and then shift click on these central shapes right here in order to select that box. Now, the effect that we have right now, thanks to the way things are colored is that this cube is indenting inward. We want to turn it into an outward cube inside of these holes right here. And so I'm going to do that by dragging this guy from its bottom left anchor point, like so, until it snaps into alignment right there and then I'll press the alt key or the option key on the Mac so we get that double white arrowhead cursor which tells me that as soon as I release, thanks to the fact I had the alt or option key down, I'm going to create a copy of that box. Now, you want to switch to the rotate tool which you can get by pressing the R key. That's going to go ahead and position the origin of rotation right there at the center of that cube which is just fine. So go ahead and press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to bring up the rotate dialog box and then change the angle value to 180 degrees and click okay. And that way, we're now pushing the box outward instead of inward. And that's why the yellow is hitting it on the same side as the other yellow faces and this dull blue is hitting it on the right hand side, just as it is on the right side of the cross and then the purple is on the bottom edge, just as it occurs on the bottom edge of the cross as well. All right now, we need to fill in this hole and you can do that by pressing the V key to switch back to the black arrow tool and then you can drag from that bottom left anchor point, once again until it snaps into alignment at this location at which point you want to press and hold the alt key or the option key on the Mac so you get that double white arrowhead and then release in order to create a copy of that shape. And notice that fills in this region down here as well which is to say, we're done. And so now, all you have to do is either click on the done button or you could just press the escape key. That also works. And that's going to update your pattern, even though the rectangle is not selected. All right now, just so we can really take in our pattern here, I'm going to go up to the view menu and choose presentation mode and that will go ahead and hide my interface here in the most recent version of Adobe Illustrator. And that is at least one way to take your cubicle gobstopper to take your cubicle gobstopper and turn it into a seamlessly repeating and turn it into a seamlessly repeating hexagonal tile pattern. hexagonal tile pattern.

Contents