Adobe Illustrator Tutorial: Create Surface Patterns

Texture is a beautiful element of art. I love the way things can look the way that they feel. Hi, I'm Lissy, artist and surface pattern designer in Oklahoma City. I create digital designs using the artwork that I create in my studio. I've worked consistently in Adobe Illustrator since 2013, and I have learned how to work seamlessly between my traditional artwork and digital platforms. In this class, I will take you through a simple process from start to finish on a pattern that you want to bring a certain texture to. I know you have something in mind. We will begin by sourcing different textures and create a texture library within Illustrator. We will learn how to vectorize artwork and use masks, brushes, and texture overlays, and I will teach you what to look for to keep file size manageable. For this class, you should have a basic understanding of Adobe Illustrator, but I will be describing the tools in the program organically as we go along, so that you can learn from any level of experience you have. The project for this class will be to create a seamless repeat pattern swatch, bringing in elements from our own artwork. Let's get started! The project for today's class is to create a seamless repeat pattern. Texture is just one of many ways to make a pattern more interesting or to add depth. With the goal of making a repeat pattern from our artwork, we will learn simple ways to add texture to our artwork by vectorizing using masks, brushes, and overlays. If you do not know how to make a seamless pattern, we will go over that in the creating a repeat pattern lesson. To get started, set up an artboard in Adobe Illustrator that is square, say 600 by 600 pixels. You will want to scan in and import any artwork and textures you want to bring in. One of the cool things about texture is that visually, textures look so much like they feel, and as we're doing this, I want you to start thinking about which textures feel like you want your artwork to look like, and then look for those textures to bring into your project. For today, I kind of have an idea of what I'm looking for, and that's that I want my pattern swatch to feel like it's been block printed on a woven fabric, and I've been thinking about what textures do I need to bring in to make that happen digitally. I can't wait to see what you do with your project. See you in the next lesson! We're ready to get started on our project. So that we can create a seamless repeat pattern in Illustrator, we're first going to vectorize some artwork. I pulled in a watercolor from my sketchbook, and we'll vectorize the pencil drawing in the next lesson. A vector image is an image that has been formatted to scale to any size without losing resolution. We vectorize images in Illustrator because it creates a highly workable file, and Illustrator is built to do this. The vectorized elements can be scaled without losing any of their attributes, and they can be colored and duplicated much faster and easier than a raster or pixel-based image. I do work with pixel-based images still, but because I see the value of having my artwork vectorized and available to readily rework, I've made it a point to find ways to create artwork here in Illustrator that I'm very happy with, and you can too. I'm going to use the image trace panel to vectorize my watercolor width, and I'm going to focus on these brush strokes. The image trace panel is found under window, image trace, and I keep my image trace panel over here in my workspace. In order to activate the image trace panel, you need to click on your image, and a list of options pops up. If I go with the default setting and click trace, this is the automatic result. Sometimes I'm pretty happy with the way that it shows up, but many times I'm not. In this case, I'm actually pretty happy with this, but I do want to add a little bit more texture. So I'm going to come over here, and we'll look at our options. In the preset panel, you have several different presets. If I was focusing on color, there are a list of options here, and you can be selective in your color, or you can do a high or low fidelity photo, and the photo options, they actually do get very realistic with the watercolor, but it makes it very difficult to rework because there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of colors, but I really do like these selective color options. The preset that I normally use when I'm looking at texture is this sketch star preset. It's going to change the image just a little bit. The threshold is the lightness or the darkness of an image, so if I pull the threshold down, it's going to create a lighter image, and if I pull the threshold up, it's going to pull in more black and create a darker image. As you can see, having more threshold here has given us the actual texture of the paper that I scanned in, so that's pretty cool. I usually keep my threshold somewhere in the middle. When I come down here to the advanced panel, I like to work with my paths and my noise. Let's zoom here so we can see a little bit what we're working with. A path is a set of anchor points that connect together to create the line of the shape, so if I pull my paths down, it's going to take down the amount of anchor points so that we have a smoother image like this, and if I go all the way to the tippy top, it's going to create a lot of roughness. One thing that this will do when it creates a lot of roughness is add a lot of anchor points, so down here you can see your anchor points, and right now we're at about 22,500, and those anchor points are all these points of reference right here for the shape. It's very common for me to pull these as high as possible, but one little trick to keep your files as manageable is to pull it down to, say, 98 or 99 percent, and you can see that these anchor points jump down considerably. Just something to keep in mind. I also like to work with the noise selection, and it is exactly what it sounds like. It adds noise. In this case, the 1 would represent more noise, and the 100 represents less noise, so I pull my noise down to the very bottom, and it adds little bits and pieces. It's a slight change here, but I want to bring us down to another part of this artwork so that we can look at a little bit more in depth. Right now, there's quite a bit of noise, and I'm going to reset so that our paths are in the middle, and there's a little less noise, and we're going to start over. You can see that it already changed, but let's just do it again. So let's pull it up to about 98 percent. I normally bump it up to 100 percent and then come down, and then let's add noise with 1 being more noise. You can see that it added lots of tiny little bits and pieces, and I really like that. So the next thing I want to do is expand all of this, so let's zoom out, and when I expand, there's one more setting I need to make sure I have clicked on, and that's this ignore white. If I wanted the background of this rectangle to be its own shape, I would unclick ignore white, but I don't want a shape surrounding all of these images, so I'm going to make sure that ignore white is selected, and I'm going to click expand, and that outlines each one of these shapes. Now for the moment, all of these shapes are grouped together so that if I colored it, you can see that it colors everything. It recognizes them as one group of objects. I don't want that because I want to be able to single out some of these motifs, because I want to be able to single out some of these motifs. So with the image selected, I'm going to right click ungroup or command shift g, and now I can come in and single out these shapes and change colors if I want to. In order to group a single motif back together, I need to grab my lasso tool, which is under my direct selection tool lasso, or I can push q, and I'm going to lasso around one of these motifs. With that selected, I'm going to push command g to group them together, v to hit my select tool, and I can pull it over to the side. Now I can change its color, and it's its own shape. I need to do the same thing with all of these others. These two elements are single shapes, so I'm not too worried about them, but I see a few more images here that I want to pull into my pattern, so I'll group those together and pull them aside. I've accomplished what I've set out to do by retaining the brushstrokes, and specifically some of the dry brushstroke looks. Now I'm ready to vectorize the pencil drawing in the next lesson. I'll meet you there. So I've already vectorized and colored and grouped together the watercolor elements that I want to use in my pattern. As you work on your project, go ahead and group together the elements that you want so that as you're finished with each step, you're ready to go. Now I'm going to vectorize this pencil drawing, and vectorizing pencil is something I've been very passionate about because I love the line of a pencil. I think pencil has such a beautiful quality, and it's a quality that I want to keep in my patterns. Sketching is hands down one of my favorite things to do, and being able to have it vectorized is very valuable. So I've spent a lot of time really perfecting how I vectorize my pencil, but it's actually using the same technique that I use with watercolor when I'm working on brushstrokes. So I'm going to click on the image and come over to my image trace panel, and in my settings I'm going to click sketch art. So I'm going to zoom in and I'm going to pull my paths up, which added a little bit more of the pencil effect. I'm going to pull my noise down, and it added all the little bits and pieces, and that looks like a pencil stroke to me. So we pulled the paths up and the noise down, and I am really happy with that. Let's look around. These pencil strokes look beautiful. I'm not too worried about my anchor points. I think everything looks really good. Let's come back out. So I've clicked ignore white, and I'm going to expand. While they're selected, I'm going to give them a color. Let's do like a green, and select that again. Push command shift g to ungroup everything. Q brings up our lasso tool. I'm going to group all of those little pieces together and pull it to the side. I can do the same thing with any of these other elements that I choose. Now that I have all of my elements vectorized, and I'm happy with the character that I've retained in them, I'm going to begin masking some of them to add a little bit more of the printed look that I'm going for. See you in the next lesson. This is a simple lesson on using masks in Illustrator. I'm going to mask the florals in the next lesson, but these particular florals will take an extra step, and we'll get to that next. For now, I'm going to show you how to mask this circle, meaning I'm going to fill it with a texture. A mask is a shape that holds a clip of an image. The image could be a photograph, or in this case, I'm going to use a texture. It's going to mask whatever's around the shape so that nothing outside of it is visible. In order to do that, I need to gather the image that we want to fill into this shape. I'm going to pull a texture from my library. You can find your library under Window, Libraries. I keep my libraries over here. I have scanned in and vectorized images and pulled them into here to keep for reference. I have this ghost print texture that I've scanned in and vectorized, and I'm going to use it to fill this shape. For those of you who don't know what a ghost print is, in printmaking, when you ink a plate and you print it, if you make another print using the remaining ink from the first print, it creates a transparent print, and that is called a ghost print. So that's what I scanned in and what I'm going to use to fill this shape. In order to mask, I'm going to place these two objects on top of each other, and it's especially important to remember that the shape that you want filled needs to be on top, so I'm going to send this texture back behind. So now the shape I want filled is on top. This is very important to remember. Then you'll select both, right-click, Make Clipping Mask is here, or you can go to Object, Clipping Mask, Make, or Command 7. And you can see that the mask has masked everything that is outside of this shape. The color went away, but this action isn't cutting out anything. It's masking what's outside of the shape with the shape acting as a reference. I can still access this texture anytime by double-clicking inside of the circle, and I can change the color, and then I can double-click to go back to my clipping mask. There are still a lot of paths and anchor points that are outside of the shape that are still embedded within Illustrator, and I want to get rid of those now that I have the mask finished and it's the color that I want. Because I'm sure that I'm done, I want to come over to my Pathfinder. You can also find this in your Window tab, and I'm going to select Trim. And I can thank Bonnie Christine for this trick because it saved so much space in my files. Thank you, Bonnie. So I've created this beautiful textured circle, and it's gorgeous. I can use it just like this. I can move it around. I can do pretty much whatever I want with it at this point. I'd like to add a circle to the underside of this one just to give it some sort of overlay, so I'll select a darker color and send that back behind it. And this just creates such a beautiful image, and I've used the texture as an overlay. So there we go. I'm going to use the same technique plus one extra step in order to mask the florals in the next lesson. I'll see you there. In this lesson, we're going to mask the florals for the pattern that I'm going to make. I've mentioned that I want this pattern to look in the end like a block printed fabric, so I always have it in mind as I go along. For your project, you may have pulled in other textures here that you have in mind. Because I want to make an overlay texture in the same way that I did here, where I've masked this texture into a shape, but then I pull the shape underneath it so the texture shows up a little bit better, I'm going to go ahead and duplicate all of these by selecting them and holding down my Option key. I'm going to focus on masking these textures so I can overlay them on top of these florals. I'm going to go ahead and pull over my texture and place it. You would think to mask these, you would just place this texture on top of this floral, and then you could mask them pretty quickly. But that's not the case here. This floral has several different shapes that are grouped together, but Illustrator doesn't yet understand which of these shapes we want to mask. So if I were going to pull over the texture right now, make sure that it's on the bottom, and push Command 7, Illustrator is confused. So what we need to do is create something called a compound path. A compound path will tell Illustrator that all of these separate shapes, all with their own paths, need to work together as one. It tells Illustrator that all of these shapes need to be included in the same action. So in order to do that, let's select our image. We need to go to Object, and just underneath Clipping Mask is Compound Path. And where Clipping Mask is Command 7, Compound Path is Command 8, which I think is really handy. So let's push Command 8 just to make sure, and you see all those little dots pop up right there. That means that the compound path has been created. Let's go ahead and pull our texture over. We'll make sure that our floral is on top. We will select both of them, and now we can make a clipping mask. And we know that we can double click into the clipping mask, and select it. Let's choose a cream color, double click out of it, and obviously we can't see it right now, but we're going to go ahead and trim the excess from around it so that our mask is kept within this shape. We don't need anything that's on the outside. I'm going to bring this to the top, because I want to place it over as an overlay, and I'm going to select these two images here. I'm going to align them, but I'm going to align them to the selection, which means I'm going to align these to each other. These two selections will align horizontally and vertically. And now we can group them together. I am going, I'm going to do the exact same thing here. I'm going to go ahead and pull out my texture. I have this subtle ghost print that I want to use, but I don't think it's going to be very visible in the cream color. So I'm just going to keep on with this more dense texture. I already know that I have two shapes here I need to create a compound path for. So Command-8 will create that compound path. Let's place our texture where we want it. It needs to be underneath the shape. I'm going to pull that down into this corner, and now we can Command-7 create the clipping mask. Let's trim it. I went ahead and trimmed it without changing the color, but I can still access that texture anytime that I want to. So I've double clicked it, and you can tell that I'm within this group layer, and I can still change this color. Let's double click out of the group layer, and I'll do the same thing here by aligning the two, grouping it together. And now I have these two textured flowers. I'm going to do the same thing down here, and I'll meet you at the end of the lesson. So now that I've masked these petals and leaves with a printed texture, I'll meet you in the next lesson so that we can use some brushes to add just a little bit more detail before we gather up these motifs and get to actually creating our repeat pattern. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out with an image of your work in progress. See you in the next lesson! We spent the last few lessons vectorizing and masking. I have one more thing that I'd like to do before we get to creating the pattern, and it's very simple. I'm going to use my brushes. The brush tool can be found over here in my panel, or I can push B anytime to get my brushes. And the biggest thing to remember about brushes is that your brush is not a shape, it's a stroke. When you're working with a brush, you want to make sure that you're working with your strokes in your swatches, not your fills. You can find your brushes up here. Adobe Illustrator comes with several brushes within it. If you go to User Defined, you can find the brushes that you've purchased from Creative Market or other brush providers. There are a lot of really amazing brushes out there right now. So I'm going to use a brush that comes within Illustrator, and it's found under the Artistic panel, Artistic Paint Brush, and this list of options pops up. I'm going to choose this brush. I can look at my stroke weight here, and I can change the size of the brush. And really all I want to do is just add a few stems. The brushes tend to look the same as you brush them, so I try to go in an opposite direction. Let's change the color of the stroke. So I tend to try to go in the opposite direction just to change it up a bit. Like I said, very simple. But I have a really cool trick that I do want to show you, and that's called Draw Inside. If I click on the selection and come over here to my drawing modes, I have a couple of options. One is Draw Normal, which is what we've been doing. Draw Behind would draw behind the selection, and Draw Inside is going to draw within the selection. And you can see that Illustrator's kind of put this bounding box around the selection. Now when I come to my brushes, let's change it. These are my frequently used brushes. I'd like to select the charcoal and pull my weight down just a little bit. I always double check my swatches, because sometimes if I've clicked on something else, like for example this shape, it will remember that fill. So I want to make sure that my stroke is selected. I'm going to change it to a cream color. Now because I've selected Draw Inside, if I draw and scribble all over this leaf, nothing's going to show up on the outside of that shape, which is pretty amazing. Draw Inside has helped me to create some really complex illustrations in Illustrator. So all I really want to do here is just add a couple of strokes to the stem of this leaf without it coming off of the edge. I'm going to come back to Drawing Modes and do Draw Normal. I'll do the same thing for the others. I use brushes as a part of my process pretty frequently, so I thought I would bring you here with me. Many times I've already put together an entire set of motifs, or they're already on the artboard, or I've already created my pattern, and brushes is a way that I can always come back and add more or add detail. There are some things I can do here in the beginning, but there are a lot of finishing touches that I can always put on. So I've actually come to love brushes more and more. The next lesson will create a seamless repeat pattern, so gather all of your elements and I'll meet you there. This is the lesson that we start creating our pattern, and this will be a seamless repeat pattern, meaning that this square will repeat over and over again as it's tiled out. And what we've done so far is bring in our work and really rounded out the elements using different techniques to retain and add character through texture. And I'm starting to see that my vision of having this printed woven look is coming to fruition. Now we need to create the pattern that repeats. I need to create a square that's 600 by 600 pixels. I'm going to select M and hold down my shift key to create the square. I'm going to choose a cream color. If you ever need to check the dimensions of your square, you can come up to transform and it will tell you the width and the height is 600 by 600 pixels. And you can check your artboard too. Your artboard tool is down here and it will highlight the artboard and up here it tells you that it's 600 by 600 pixels. I'm going to lock my square by pushing command 2 so that my square isn't moving around while I'm moving around artwork. So now I'm going to grab my artwork and I want to move it onto the artboard. I'm keeping some of the elements of artwork hanging off the edge of the artboard because this is the repeating tile and whatever hangs off the edge here, I need to pick up exactly on the other side of this. To move this artwork down 600 pixels, we're going to use the move tool. Select all of your artwork and go to object, transform, move or command shift m and it's going to bring up this dialog box. Right now it's previewed so it moved over, but we know that this box is 600 by 600 pixels and we want the artwork that was here to move down 600 pixels, which is vertically. And we'll get to the horizontal movement in just a second. So horizontally, I don't want it to move any pixels right now, so zero pixels. And vertically, I want it to move 600 pixels down. If I wanted it to move up, I would place a negative here. But I want it to move down and if I were just to push okay, it would move the entire motif down. So if you want to move something in Illustrator, that's a good way to do it. You can say I want it to move a thousand pixels this way, but I don't want to move this object. I want to create a copy. So I'm going to push copy and you can see where this cuts off on this floral here. Picks up here in exactly the same place. Now I want to do my horizontal and I'm going to select everything on this edge to move horizontally and I'm going to push command shift m or object transform move. And I want it to move forward 600 pixels horizontally and zero pixels vertically and push copy. And there we have a copy of everything that ends on one side picks up on the other side, on all sides. I've decided that I want to reflect this image on the other side, so I need to make a copy by holding option and I want to rotate it. So if I push shift, it will rotate it exactly 180 degrees and then I can pull it back over here. There we go. Now I have another set of artwork that is hanging off the edge and so I want to make sure to pull that back over here. I'm going to ungroup it just to make it a little easier myself. So command shift g ungroups those and I'm going to highlight what is there. Command shift m to move it. It will be 600 pixels horizontally, zero pixels vertically and copy them over. And I think that looks pretty accurate on all sides. Now the way that we can tell illustrator that this needs to be a pattern swatch, there's something very specific that illustrator asks us to do and that is to make a square that has no fill and no stroke. And you put it behind everything that's on the artboard so that it's the very bottom object. So first I'm going to unlock this rectangle. Because it's already the size of the artboard, I'm just going to copy it. Command c. I'm going to paste it behind. Command b. Paste it behind and with it already selected, I can come over my swatches panel and select none for the fill so it has no stroke and no fill. The way that you can check this is by going to your layers, window layers, and this is everything that's on the artboard right now. I don't have several layers. I have one layer basically but if I look through all the elements, there should be two rectangles here and this rectangle is the no stroke no fill and this rectangle is the background. Now that we have the no stroke no fill square in the very back of the entire artboard, I can highlight everything that's on this artboard and I can drag it over to the swatches panel and up here on this top line illustrator will create a swatch. And we can check it by creating a square and filling it with the pattern. And it worked! We've created a seamless repeat pattern. This pattern will repeat endlessly. I have one more thing I want to do which is add that woven texture in the final lesson. I'll be bringing in some texture overlays from fabric swatches that I purchased from Creative Market. At this point, I know you've made an amazing pattern and I can't wait to see it. Be sure to post it below whether you stop here or you add a texture overlay in the next lesson. I just can't wait to see what you've created. I'll see you in the final lesson. Welcome to my final lesson in textures in Adobe Illustrator. We've created a pattern from start to finish with a certain goal that we had in mind. And with this pattern, I'm going to add that one additional detail which is the texture overlay of a fabric swatch to give it that woven look. So in Creative Market, I purchased some textures. And this file came with 24 swatches in four different files. So each file has six. They are seamless repeating textures. And the reason I really like this is because the artist has already done a lot of work so that when it repeats, there's not a lot of gaps or obvious holes. So it will also repeat in the pattern. I do have a couple of repeating patterns that I've created. But for example, with this linen, it would take a lot of work to scrub out any of the inconsistencies that you would find as, say, this would repeat. So I'm going to grab this one and I'm just going to push Command C and come back over to my pattern. Command V to paste it in. I'm going to drag it to the top left corner. And because it's repeating, I can just hold my Shift and drag it to the other side here. Let's zoom in a little bit so you can see. With this darker color, it already gives it more of a woven feel. I don't think I want to keep the black though. I am going to change it to this gold, which changes it quite a bit. And then maybe take down the opacity. Pull it back up. And this creates something very, very subtle. But I have another idea. Let's zoom out. I really do like the slight texture, but I think I want to create a darker version and then I would change the texture that goes along with it. So push Option and Shift to hold it in place to align it. And I've created a copy of the pattern. To get to this background, I'm going to lock the texture really quick and select this image and give it a dark blue. Let's zoom back in so we can see what we're working with. Command Option 2 will unlock what's on the artboard. And let's bring this opacity all the way back up so we can see this cream color that I'm going to put on. And that's so pretty. I just love that so much. There are so many different options. We have a dark background here with a light texture. Up here we have a cream with a darker texture. So just so many different ways that we can play with this. Different textures can go on top. I like it with no texture. This almost looks like a fresco to me, which is that carving in and then painting of plaster that you would see in Europe. So pretty. So there's just so many different options. So definitely something to look at is what is the field that you're going for and you can achieve it. I'm going to go ahead and pull this swatch over to my swatches panel so that I can see it over here in this test swatch. And again, just so pretty and definitely exactly what I was looking for. We have finished a project. We started with the hand-drawn elements. We went all the way through to making the pattern and then finishing with this overlay. I'm so excited to see what you come up with. I hope these lessons gave you some good practice in using texture. Make sure to post your project below. I can't wait to see it. Bye for now!