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Hello! I'm Cristina from Elan Creative Co. and in this tutorial I want to show
you how to make seamless patterns in Illustrator using the Pattern Tool. This
Illustrator tutorial is only for Illustrator CS6 and CC. If you have
Illustrator CS5 or older, you should check out my other seamless pattern
tutorial. So open Illustrator and let's get started! Create a new document and
give it a new name. I'm going to start with an artboard that's 6 by 6
inches in RGB color and at 300ppi. Click Create to continue. I have
here a few floral illustrations that I'm going to use for this pattern. These were
hand-drawn, scanned, and digitized using Illustrator. If you want to follow
along you can download this winter flower sample pack from my website. Just
click the image description and follow the link. Unzip the file and you can
extract the Illustrator files. I'm going to select everything using the Selection
tool, then I'm going to press Ctrl + C to copy them and Ctrl + V to paste them in my
new document. So now that I have my elements I can start making the pattern.
I'm going to start by adding the branches and after that I'm going to add
some of the filler elements, like berries and leaves.
I want to create a random repeating pattern so the branches are scattered
around the artboard. Some of them are even outside the artboard but keep in
mind that it's important to have them inside the art board. So they should at
least touch the artboard if even if they are something like this. Now I have
this white space around the items and I'm going to fill it with some of the
smaller elements, like berries and leaves.
When you are happy with the design, delete the rest of the elements and then
use the Selection tool to select everything. I'm not going to add a
background for this pattern yet because it doesn't always work well with the
Pattern tool. So just select all the elements and then go to Object > Pattern >
Make. This will bring out the Pattern tool so let's take a look at the options.
You can give your pattern a new name. I'm going to call it Winter Flowers. You can
choose from one of the five tile types. I am going to leave Grid for this pattern
but the others also look great and you can make many different patterns using
them. Then here we have the width and height of our pattern tile. Now I want
the pattern tile to be the same size as the artboard. That's because I want to be
able to save it as the tileable JPEG or EPS file so I need to know the
dimensions of my pattern. So I'm going to enter 6 inches for the width and 6
inches for the height of the pattern. If you want to go back to the original size,
just click on the Size Tile to Art button and it will go back. So let's make
it 6 by 6 again. Down here we also have a few options. The
Copy refers to the number of copies of our pattern tile. Then the Dim Copies. If
you choose to make them 70% for example, it will lower the opacity of your copies
so you can see the main pattern over here. So I usually keep it somewhere
around 50%. And also you have this option to Show
the Tile Edge I think it's better to show it because you can see the edges
and it's easier to arrange the items. Because I made the pattern tiles smaller,
some of the elements are overlapping, like this branch over here. So you'll
have to rearrange them or even delete them. I think I'm going to delete this
element. Now if you move the elements outside the tile area, the element won't
appear in your pattern. If you add it inside, it doesn't matter where we add it,
you can see that a copy of the element appears here. So for now I'm going to
leave some of the elements outside the tile area and rearrange the large
branches.
So when you want to test your pattern, just dim the copies to 100%, then use the
Hand tool to move around. What you're looking for are areas where items
overlap, or where items are cut off, or maybe very large white spaces. I can
probably spend hours just tweaking a pattern but I want to keep this tutorial
short so I'm going to save it even if it's not quite done yet. So when you're
happy with your pattern just click Done to save it.
Just a quick tip. If you want your pattern tile to be a certain size, you
can use the Rectangle tool. Make sure it has no fill and no stroke and then
create a pattern that's the size you want. So I'm going to go with 6 by 6
inches like my artboard and then I am going to align it to the artboard and
I'm also going to send it to the back. So now I'm going to use the Selection tool
to select everything. Make sure you're all rectangle is selected and then go to
Object > Pattern > Make. As you can see now our pattern tile is 6 by 6 inches. When
you create a pattern using the Pattern tool, a pattern swatch will appear here
in the Swatches panel. If you can't see the Swatches panel, you can open it form
Window and Swatches. So I'm going to select the pattern swatch and then
go back to the Rectangle tool and I'm going to create a rectangle that's 6 by
6 inches. Let's switch back to the Selection tool. Now this rectangle is a
seamless pattern tile. So if you make a copy of the pattern you can see that it
repeats seamlessly. So I'm going to delete this and I want to add a
background to this pattern.You can't see it because I have a white artboard
but it doesn't have a background. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to copy
this rectangle using the command Ctrl + C and then I'm going to paste it in the
back using the command Ctrl + B. If you take a look at the Layers panel you can
see that we have two rectangles here. Now this rectangle in the back is selected
so I'm going to change its color to this off-white. Now I am going to select both
of them and I am going to go to Object > Expand. This will expand the pattern
swatch. And I'm going to make sure both of them are selected again and go to the
Pathfinder tools. If you can't see them, you can go to Window > Pathfinder and then
I'm going to click on Crop. So now I have group here that I am going
to move to the Swatches panel. Or let's go back to Object > Pattern > Maker. You can
click on it and drag it to the Swatches panel. So as you can see now we have a
pattern that has a colorful background. Just click Done to save it. Now I can
delete this and let's use the Rectangle tool to draw a large rectangle. So this
is our pattern without the background and this is our pattern with a
background. You can add many backgrounds to it, just make sure to expand it and
then use the Pathfinder tool to crop it. Hope you've enjoyed this tutorial. If you
want to see more Photoshop and Illustrator tutorials, please visit my
blog or subscribe to my channel. Thanks for watching!