Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show
you how to make a polka dot pattern in Adobe Illustrator. All right, let's get started.
All right, I'm here in Adobe Illustrator, and I'm going to create a new document.
I'll go to Print up here at the top, and then choose Letter. And we'll create. I'm going to
hit L on my keyboard, which will bring us to the Ellipse tool, which is right over here.
I'm going to hold SHIFT and draw a perfect circle, right on my page. I'm going to click on my fill,
and then I'll choose a different color. Maybe we'll go with kind of a purplish color over here.
If you don't see Color up here, you can just go to Window > Color, and it's right here. And so
are all of these other palettes. If you're not seeing them, and you want to find them,
they're all under Window. Okay, let's click on our stroke and we don't need a stroke. So I'm
going to click this 'none' button right here. All right, so we have a fill only. And the next step
is just to go to Object > Pattern > Make. And this automatically saves a new pattern to our Swatches
panel right over here. So this will behave just like a swatch. We'll say OK, and here are our
pattern options. All the little polka dots are touching, and we don't want that. So we'll adjust
the spacing here in a minute. But first I want to go to Tile type - Grid. If we click this, we have
a few options underneath here. And you can click through every one of them to see what they do.
My favorite is hex by row. And now there are two different ways to change the spacing. The first
way is the width and height. Make sure your lock is checked, so they'll be equally spaced apart.
Let's highlight the width, and I'm just going to use my arrow keys.
You can hold SHIFT and use your arrow keys to really change the spacing quickly, so that's one
way of doing it. Now the other way - I'm going to undo back to where we were - is to come down
here and check Size Tile to Art. This will give us our horizontal spacing and our vertical spacing.
And now with the lock checked here, we can do the same thing: we can increase or decrease this
however we wan. The copies here will actually just change the view, so you can see how it looks with
more selected. So if I have nine, it'll show me more of the pattern. Basically, I usually
just leave this on five by five. And this is looking pretty nice. So I'm going to go to Done
right up here at the top. You can see the swatch updated right over here in the Swatches palette.
I'm going to zoom out a little bit, and as I mentioned earlier, this is a swatch so you can use
it any way this swatch is used. Let's draw another circle. So I'll hit L on my keyboard to get my
Ellipse tool. I want to make this one really big, I'm holding SHIFT to constrain proportions. I'll
click on my fill, and then I'm going to choose the pattern. It's completely filled that shape with
the pattern. Now let's draw a square. So we'll click this and choose Rectangle tool. And I'm
going to hold SHIFT and draw a square. And this time I'm going to flip the fill and the stroke.
Now you can't see it very well, but it is actually there. Let's increase our stroke. You can see the
polka dots are the stroke now. And then you can also create text made with that swatch too. So
I'm going to just type 'text.' I'll get our my Selection tool and make it quite a lot bigger.
And then I'm going to use this as the fill of the text. Now it doesn't show up very well,
and I think it's because our polka dots are too big right now. So what if we wanted to make
smaller polka dots? One thing we can do is double click this swatch over here, which gives us all of
our options back. We can decrease our spacing, and I'm going to zoom in here, get my Selection tool
and just select the polka dot itself. I'll hold SHIFT and OPTION or SHIFT and ALT on a PC and just
drag it in. This will make it smaller. And it also changes the spacing around it, as you can see.
I think I'll put it here like this. And then I want the spacing to be a little bit less like
this. Okay, and then we'll go to Done. And that has updated our swatch. I'm going to zoom out,
and you'll see that the text is a little easier to see. Now the other way to adjust the spacing
is to click on your shape or your text and then hit S and Enter on your keyboard. The S will
bring you to your Scale tool, and Enter or Return will just be like double clicking it like this.
So you can also get to that that way. I'm going to uncheck all of these options except for the
patterns, and then this is pretty small. Let's make it...we'll put it at 60%. When I say OK,
it'll update only that one. It'll still leave the other objects
that are created with the pattern unchanged. So that's a good way to do it if you only want
to change the pattern in one place. Now what if we wanted to change our color?
We could do this the same way by double clicking in the swatch, clicking on our circle, and then
just changing it to any other color we wanted. And then we'll come up here to Done. Now this will
update everywhere. So anytime you're within this dialog box and you make changes here,
they'll update to all of the objects that you've used the pattern on. The pattern will update
everywhere it's located in your document. Let's increase our spacing, and then we'll go to Done.
Now everything is spaced out again. So it's that easy to make a polka dot pattern and then make
changes to it if you want to. Okay, if you liked this video, please click on the Like button.
And I'll see you in a couple of days with another graphic design tutorial. Thank you!!!