Hi, this is Anne for Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to tell you how to make
a seamless pattern.
Now this works in any version of Illustrator.
So you don't have to have the latest and greatest.
I know that CC and CS6 both have something called Pattern Maker.
And we're not going to go into that, but I just wanted to show you a really easy way
if you don't have CS or CC.
But let's go ahead and get started.
So the first thing we want to do is make a rectangle or a square.
You can make it any size, but I'm just going to go with 500 by 500.
So we'll go up here to 'Transform', and we can click this.
OK.
Click off of that.
Oops, and then put that there.
OK, so now I'm just going to focus mostly on the left side of this and grab a few...oh...let's
send this to the back.
That's SHIFT CMD [ . So I'm going to grab a few of these different icons and kind of
place them over the edge a little bit.
Um, put on a yellow one.
Yeah.
Do that...maybe put this down here.
Um, yeah, that might work.
No, let's get rid of that.
OK, and now we'll look at the bottom.
Let's add an orange book here, yellow, a little bit of a green one, and then maybe this.
OK.
I'll move these things out of the way, because what we want to do is copy these things and
push them 500 pixels to the right so they land exactly on this line where they are here.
So I'm going to select all of these.
They're grouped, and if they're not grouped, you can just highlight each one and group
them separately.
OK, so let's grab all four.
I'm going to copy with CMD C, and then paste in front, which is CMD F. And now hit V and
return.
And that'll bring up this dialog box.
Now we can move the position, Horizontal 500 pixels and Vertical zero.
So we're just moving it to the right 500 pixels, and then we say, 'OK'.
And as you can see, it puts it right on that line, the same exact position as over here.
So let's do the same thing with this stuff on the bottom.
I'm going to copy, paste in front.
So let's move this up.
That's V, return.
And now instead of Horizontal, we'll put that at zero and at Vertical, since we we're going
up, we'll have a negative 500.
And there we go.
And you can see here that it's starting to touch this other book.
So if that happens, you just need to grab both of these books and position them...maybe
you can res..., well, we don't want to resize.
That would...we'd have to kind of do it again, but just position them so they're out of the
way.
And now that we have these things done, we can go ahead and fill in the center with other
books here and there, we'll just put them wherever...
kind of complete the pattern, complete the look.
And maybe we'll put this here and this here...make that a little bit bigger.
And at this point, it doesn't matter where you put them or any of that.
OK, so I think this is pretty good.
I might want to move this one and this one back over a little bit to kind of even out
that, that part.
OK, so we have a pattern started now.
So now we need to take the background, just with your V Tool, copy that, and then clear
all, which is SHIFT CMD A or SHIFT CTRL A, and then CMD V for paste behind.
Now that one behind cannot have a filler stroke, so go ahead and get rid of your fill by hitting
the question mark key.
If your stroke is in front, you can hit the question mark and make sure that has no fill
or stroke either.
All right, and now let's take everything and drag it into the Swatches palette.
OK.
Now, I'm going to CMD minus, so we have a big area to work with.
And I'm going to draw a big rectangle.
And now I'll make sure that the fill is in front by clicking it or you can also X to
get that in front.
And now I'll come over here to our 'Swatches' and click our new pattern.
And as you can see, it's completely seamless.
Parts of it are going to seem like it's not an actual seamless pattern, but that's just
how IIlustrator does.
When you zoom in really close, you can see that is seamless.
And that's my tutorial for today...just a quick simple pattern.
Let me know if you have any questions or are having trouble with this one.
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And this is Anne for Graphic Design How To.
Thanks, guys!!!