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

914 Lantern tile: Type 1, onion

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

914 Lantern tile: Type 1, onion

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. This week is about something simple and yet fascinating. Lantern tiles inside Adobe Illustrator. Now, a strict lantern tile is one that repeats seamlessly as you move and duplicate the tile into endless rows and columns. In this movie we'll start with the so-called onion tile, which you're about to draw without a hitch using the old school pen tool. Whether you consider yourself an artist or not, I've set things up so you cannot fail. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, I'm going to start things off inside this document that has a couple of center guides. And if you're wondering how I created such a thing, you can check out Deke's Techniques 379, which is called Two ways to create center guides in Illustrator. And it originally came out years and years ago on January 2nd of the year 2015. All right, I'm going to go ahead and select that text and press the Backspace key or the Delete key on the Mac to get rid of it. And next what you want to do is go ahead and click and hold on whatever line tool that you're seeing inside of the tool box and choose this guy from the flyout menu, the rectangular grid tool. And then go ahead and select the guides layer. Go up to the View menu and make sure that Smart Guides are turned on. And then I want you to Alt or Option + Click at the intersection of those two center guides in order to bring up the rectangular grid tool Options dialog box. Now, just by virtue of the fact that you clicked with this tool, that brings up the dialogue box by virtue of the fact that you pressed the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac, you're going to create the grid from the center out. Now, for our purposes here, we want the width to be 708 points, and we want the height to be 472. Although you can adjust those amounts if you want to. But these next amounts, you can't adjust. You want to leave them the same as me. And that is to say, we want a total of three horizontal dividers, the skew should be set to 0%, and we want one vertical divider. Again, the skew needs to be 0%. You want the first check box to be turned on. You want the first check box to be turned on. So we have a rectangle around the grid, and you do not want to fill the grid. So make sure that second check box is off. At which point, click OK in order to create the grid that you're seeing on screen. Now you want to go up to the View menu, choose Guides, and then choose this guy, Make Guides, in order to convert that grid to a snapping guide. All right, now go ahead and select the next layer up here inside the layers panel. And I'm going to go ahead and rename this layer, lantern, because we're going to be creating a kind of lantern tile. And then grab the pen tool, which you can get by pressing the P key. Now, I want to establish some formatting attributes up front, so I'm going to click in the stroke value up here in the horizontal control panel. And if you're not seeing that panel here inside Illustrator, then you want to go to the Window menu and choose this command right here, Control, in order to turn it on. And I'm going to go ahead and set the stroke value, which is the line weight, incidentally, to 21 points, happens to work out nicely. And that should go ahead and automatically set the color of the stroke to black. All right, now this is the point at which the design pretty much draws itself. You want to click and drag right here upward like so, in order to create a smooth point at that location where you first clicked. And then a control handle up at this location right here. So you're just dragging from one guide increment to another. Now you want to go up to this guy, so the intersection of the vertical guideline and the top horizontal guide. And just go ahead and drag up a little bit and then press and hold the Control key or the Command key on the Mac in order to temporarily access the white arrow tool, and go ahead and drag this guy down until it snaps into alignment with this guide intersection right here. All right, now move your cursor back over that most recent anchor point and Alt or Option + drag from it down like so. And that's going to go ahead and break the link between the two control handles so you now have a cusp point. And you want to go ahead and drag that guy down to the very same position as the other control handle like so. Now move your cursor down to this location and drag downward to the next grid increment in order to create this absolutely symmetrical pair of curving segments. All right, now move your cursor to the bottommost guide intersection and drag down like so. And then you want to press and hold the Control key or the Command key on the Mac to temporarily access that white arrow tool once again, and drag this handle up to this intersection right there. So you should actually see the word guide there when you snap into alignment. Now move your cursor back down to that most recent anchor point and Alt or Option + drag like so in order to move this most recent control handle independently of the previous one, and go ahead and drag it back to that exact same location. Again, you should see the word guide when you snap into alignment. And that is going to once again, convert that anchor point to a cusp point. And now you want to move back to that first anchor point, go ahead and click and drag on it just as you did when you first created it all the way back up to this guide intersection right there, and you will have created an absolutely symmetrical, albeit organic path outline. All right, now I'm going to switch back to the black arrow tool, which you can get by pressing the V key. And then just go ahead and partially marquee any portion of this path outline like so. And incidentally, it's worth checking to make sure that your guidelines are locked down so you don't end up selecting them. And you can confirm that that's the case by going up to the View menu, once again, dropping down to Guides, and choosing this command. If it reads Unlock Guides, leave it alone. If it reads Lock Guides, go ahead and choose the command. All right, mine are already locked down, however, so I'll just go ahead and dismiss that menu. And now I'll click on the word Stroke up here in the control panel and I'll change the corner to Round Join like so. All right now press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to accept that change. That actually ended up bringing up the move dialog box, which I don't want. So I'll press the Escape key in order to get rid of it. And now I want you to see, if I drag this path outline by its leftmost anchor point, and for this to work, by the way, the bounding box needs to be turned off. Which is another thing you can confirm by going back to the View menu and checking this command. If it reads Show Bounding Box, do not choose the command. If it reads Hide Bounding Box, do choose it. In any event, mine are already hidden. So I'll go ahead and drag this leftmost anchor point until it snaps into alignment with this top one, and then I'll press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac to accept that change. And now I'll drag this bottommost anchor point until it snaps into alignment with that left anchor point, and I'll press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac in order to create a copy of that guy. And then I'll Shift + Click on this other item up here, this path outline up here at the top, and then I'll drag these guys, these two selected path outlines, by their middle anchor point right there until they snap into alignment with this bottommost one. And then I'll press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac in order to create a copy of them. And you can see, even better if I turn off the guides layer, that we now have these perfectly aligned lantern style tiles. And that's how you draw, without any effort whatsoever, like an absolute rockstar here inside Illustrator. The great thing about lantern tiles, you can't just create one. In fact, if I'm to be believed, you have to create three. Which is why if you're a member of LinkedIn Learning, I have two, count them, two followup movies, in which I show you how to create two more varieties of lantern tiles, starting with this guy, which I call traditional, and ending with this one, which I'm calling scallop. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.

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