Easily make VECTOR HALFTONES In Adobe Illustrator

creating clean vector halftone patterns in adobe illustrator is super easy and a cool way to add a little bit of style to your designs so let's check out how to make some i'm a big fan of halftones i am a screen printer after all so i do see them a lot but today we're actually going to use them as a design element you can use halftone patterns to spice up damn near any design you can make them out of traditional circles or you can make geometric halftone patterns out of squares diamonds polygons and probably some other shapes if you're creative enough whatever design you're working on there's probably a way to complement it with a half tone pattern i'm going to show you how to make two different styles of halftone patterns that both give sort of a gradient effect one that's linear and straight and one that's staggered here's both styles made with a few different shapes the straight version being a more basic and simple taper while the staggered version gives you a much more dynamic look and the gradient effect looks a little bit more like how a halftone pattern would react in practical use i'm also going to show you how this can be used in a simple type design and as a bonus i'm going to show you how to make that cool hexagon honeycomb looking halftone pattern at the end of the video so you should probably stick around for that all right let's get started i've already got adobe illustrator open but what you're going to do is open up a new document and have that document sized to 1000 by 1000 pixels it's important to have the document units set to pixels for more control over setting up the pattern later on the document color mode doesn't matter that's your preference depending on what you're working on the raster effects don't matter because we're not using any raster effects in this artwork we're using vector stuff but i've got mine set to high just because that's a habit i have so once you're in there the next thing you're going to go up to view and make sure you have smart guides and snap to point turned on the next thing you want to do is go over to your toolbar and grab your rectangle tool or hit the m key on your keyboard and click anywhere on the artboard you want to make a square that's 800 by 800 pixels once you have that click ok hit the v key to bring your selection tool back and we're going to just center this thing up on the artboard i'm also going to remove the fill from the square but i'm going to leave this black stroke or add a black stroke if you don't already have one this is just so that we can see what we're doing later on once you have this all done just hit command 2 or control 2 if you're on pc to lock it in place that way we can't accidentally click on it moving forward we'll start off with the straight pattern first for the people who maybe are brand new to illustrator or i've never done this before because it's definitely the easier of the two we're only going to be using the shape tool the blend tool and the transform tool to get this whole thing done actually we're pretty much only using those tools for all of this stuff so you're definitely going to get to learn how those work today choose what shape you want to use by right-clicking on the rectangle tool in the toolbar i'm going to keep it simple today use circles for a traditional halftone pattern so we want to use the ellipse tool so click that or just hit the l key on your keyboard to bring that up the size of the circles that you use is going to determine how your half tone pattern turns out so this is where you can kind of play around and experiment a little bit smaller circles are going to give you that more realistic looking halftone gradient while bigger circles are going to give you that more exaggerated cartoonish look i personally think that when using them as a design element that the cartoonish look is a little bit nicer so that's what we're going to use today so you can just hold shift and click and drag out your first circle or if you want you can just click down on the artboard and make the exact size that you want i'm going to make a circle that's 20 by 20 pixels here to get started and this will be the first dot in our pattern i'm also going to change the fill to black and get rid of the stroke i'm going to zoom in a little bit here bring back the selection tool with my v key and i'm going to move this thing until the center of the circle intersects with the corner of our guide that's why we turned on smart guides and snap to point right there makes life a lot easier next with it still selected you want to click the option key or alt key if you're on a pc and drag a copy up to the top corner i'm also holding the shift key while i do this so it moves in a straight line so move that copy up to there you can see it locked in at the corner of our guide and i'm also going to change the size of this circle down to two pixels you can see it stayed locked in on our center point there zoom back out click and drag to select both of those circles at the same time go up to object blend and make and that's going to start filling that gap with a bunch of circles tapering down from the biggest one to the smallest one go back to that same menu again so object blend and this time select blend options make sure you've got your preview turned on and spacing the little drop down menu here make sure it's set to specified steps and now you can click on this little number here and use your up and down arrow keys on your keyboard to make more or less dots in that blend again this is where you can go with what looks best to your eye in my opinion i think a good half tone taper starts off with the first two dots just barely touching so we're gonna go up to we're gonna go up to 40 steps here you can see those first two dots are just barely overlapping each other and click okay with the blend that you just made still selected you're gonna go up to effect distort and transform and click on transform and again make sure preview is turned on if it isn't already change the amount of copies to any random number right now because that's gonna change so i'm just gonna put four for now and we're gonna go up to this move box here and use the horizontal move tool you can use this little slider if you want or you can use the number beside it which is what i like to use so click on that and use the up arrow key on your keyboard to start dragging out those four copies that we made what we're looking for here is to have even spacing between these things so i'm just going to keep going up until it looks good to my eye i'm really looking for that little star shape between the two circles to look nice and uniform i think at 19 pixels it looks perfect so we're gonna run with that i'm gonna click on the amount of copies now and just hold down the up arrow key until it fills up that square so right there at 42 is good click ok your blend should still be selected so now to finish this whole thing up just go up to object and expand appearance and boom you've got a bunch of vector halftone dots all nicely grouped together you can change the color of them you can really do whatever you want with them now these are done you know just for fun i'm going to stick this inside of a clipping mask just to clean it up so i'm going to bring up the m key and draw a square around these things let's get it all nicely centered up with each other actually i'm going to move that square up just a little bit right there select both hit command 7 to make a clipping mask there we go that looks a little bit better now and that's our finished straight line half tone pattern moving on to the staggered style this one is so much cooler and it looks radish using a bunch of different shapes the diamond and the hexagon being my personal favorites but quickly before we do that i'm going to take a few seconds to mention today's video sponsor skillshare skillshare is an online learning community filled with all kinds of killer classes to help you learn damn near anything we're obviously working with illustrators today and skillshare has a seemingly endless amount of classes covering everyone from the day one beginner to the season pro a good one to check out would be the illustrator essentials training by daniel scott and because they're sponsoring today's video skillshare is giving away a free one month trial membership to the first 1 000 of you guys who join the community using the link in the description below i learned all the tools that we're using here today on skillshare years ago when i was a noob so definitely check that out if you're interested in learning more about how this stuff works back to work so the first step in this one is the exact same as the other one so hit the l key to bring up your ellipse tool click and make a 20 pixel by 20 pixel circle we're gonna drag that and intersect it with the bottom corner of our guide option shift drag to bring a copy up to the top corner we're gonna change this one to two pixels by two pixels the same as the other and now we're gonna select both of them at the same time and option shift drag to bring a copy of them to the other side of our guide here we're gonna use the blend tool again but this time in a little bit of a different order so we're gonna select the bottom two dots to start off with because those are the more important ones that determine how this pattern turns out go up to object blend make and then back to object blend and blend options again we're going to use specified steps and we're just going to crank this up to get the amount of circles in there that we want again this is where you can use your eye and go with what looks best to you you can experiment with more dots or less dots and it makes different styles of patterns i'm going for that nice smooth gradient effect so i'm gonna go up until the dots are either touching or almost touching so i'm gonna go up here to we're gonna go with 38 because well you know now select the two smaller top dots we're gonna do the same thing again so object blend make and we're gonna go to object blend blend options and we're gonna make sure those steps are set to that same number that you used so in this case 38 hit okay next we're going to select both of the top and the bottom sets of dots and we're going to go up to object and expand to turn those into shapes with them both still selected go up to object blend and make and again object blend blend options and change the specified steps to the same as the other two 38 and then one more time we're gonna go up to object and expand to turn those into a bunch of vector shapes i know it looks like we just made the same thing but stick with me here this is where it gets cool so with your pattern still selected go up to effect distort and transform and transform and we're going to change the amount of copies to one and now we're going to use the same move tool except we're going to use the horizontal and the vertical so we'll start off with the horizontal and start pulling that out and the vertical start pulling it down a little bit and now you can see we're getting that cool vector gradient half tone effect this part is going to change depending on the size of the dot that you used or the different shape that you used but what you're looking for here is to get that new group of shapes offset and centered between the originals so i've already done this size of a dot before so i know to get it dead center between the other ones that i need to go 10 5 on the horizontal and 10 5 on the vertical to make it perfectly centered and lastly to finish this thing up with it still selected all you have to do is go up to object expand appearance and all your vector shapes are ready to go if you want to you can go to the pathfinder and unite them and make one solid shape out of it and actually i'm gonna stick this inside of a clipping mask again just because it looks really weird with those bulbous circles hanging outside the outer edges so again i'm just gonna drag a box around it get these two centered up on each other i'm gonna move this up a little bit on this one too and select both command seven to clipping mask it and there we go now our vector pattern looks nice and finished so let's check out this style of a pattern inside of a piece of type real quick i already have my favorite saying built out of one of our awesome fonts called bludgeoner the link for that is also in the description it's good i made my pattern for this by using a rectangle as a guide rather than a square and i size the rectangle according to where i wanted those half tones to land within the text the steps to create the pattern remain the same the only thing that changed was the amount of copies in that blend and the numbers i used to offset the two patterns at the end but i'm going to style this thing up real quick so this text has kind of like a drippy toxic look to it i think it looks badass so i've got these slimy green colors to go with this thing so i'm going to select the top text with this bright green also the middle text with this bright green and the bottom one with the darker green now i'm going to select my half tone pattern i'm going to turn that into the darker green as well and i'm going to move it into that center text to where i kind of want it to lie in there so that looks kind of even at the top and the bottom actually those guides are telling me it's dead center so we're going to run with that right there the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to select that type i'm going to hit command c to copy and command f to paste in place and that new layer that we just pasted should be the one that's selected so i'm going to right click and go down to arrange and bring to front to put it in front of the halftone pattern to finish it up is pretty simple with that top layer still selected hit command 8 to turn it into a compound path hold down your shift key and click your half tone pattern so that should be your top layer and the halftone pattern both selected at the same time hit command 7 to turn that into a clipping mask hit yes and now your halftone pattern is inside there we just got to finish it up by adding some more dark green to the bottom of this thing so i'm just going to double click on my letters real quick to go inside of that clipping mask bring up the rectangle tool with the m key and draw a box down on the bottom of our letters here so i just wanted to meet the bottom of our half tone pattern right there and turn that to the darker green hit the escape key and that's it our piece of type is done and that looks so sick actually maybe let's color this outline too because we're already here let's make this purple yeah that's some frankenstein right there i couldn't figure out which one of these i like better so here's both of them the point is this just shows that these patterns can make a simple looking design look pretty badass easily by adding that little bit of razzle dazzle not sure how i just said badass and razzle dazzle in the same sentence but whatever i'm running with it all right now for our bonus hexagon geometric pattern this one is all the same steps as the last pattern that we just did it's just a little bit more difficult because a hexagon is not an even shape all the way around this one requires a really good eye and a little bit of patience so i'm already set up here with my hexagon shapes in the four corners of my guide the only thing here is you got to make sure that the bottom are 20 pixels wide and not tall same thing with the top they're two pixels wide and not two pixels tall if you don't know how to make a hexagon just right click on the rectangle tool and go down select polygon tool click and drag out a shape but don't let go of your mouse just yet use your up and down arrow keys to add or remove the amount of sides on your shape and then if you want to straighten it out with it still clicked just hold down the shift key and then you can let it go so same first step we're going to select the bottom two shapes go up to object blend and make and before we go to the next menu we're gonna zoom in just a little bit on these things and then go object blend and blend options here we're looking to have an even amount of spacing between all the shapes so you're gonna have to eyeball this one i'm gonna go up to 26 looks pretty good you can see between here it looks like this would be the same size of a hexagon shape as our actual shape so that looks good i'm running with that go back and select your top row we're gonna go object blend again make blend and blend options we're going to change that number to the same 26 steps select your top and bottom row object expand okay and again we're going to kind of zoom in a little bit here towards your bottom row this is where the amount of steps that we use is going to be different than the others because a hexagon is a lot wider than it is tall so we're going to go to object and blend make object blend blend options and we're going to crank up the amount of steps until those first two the bottom two hexagons are just about touching each other so as close as you can get right there is perfect at 45 steps there's basically a ball hair separating those two so perfect we're running with that go up to object and expand to turn that into a group of vector shapes and again we're going to zoom way in tight on this bottom group of hexagons we'll go up to effect distort and transform transform and change the copies to one and start messing around with that horizontal and vertical just like we did before to get these things to line up is going to take a fair bit of tweaking and definitely some patience this is why we zoomed in so tight you're also probably gonna have to go up to the hundredth decimal place to line these things up right because even if they're off a tiny little bit you can tell at least i can but i'm a crazy person so to get these lined up i'm gonna set my horizontal to 14.82 and set the vertical to 8.62 and there we go that's nice and centered i already did this once earlier so don't think i pulled those numbers out of thin air i'm not that smart and to finish it up we're gonna go one more time to object expand appearance and that's it you've got a clean honeycomb hexagon vector halftone pattern thing that looks so good and that's everything making vector halftone patterns really isn't that hard but it is a awesome tool to have in your arsenal the beauty of these things is they're infinitely scalable being vector obviously and you can make a bunch of them today save them and drop them into your design work later on anytime you need them if you learned anything here today please show some love back by slapping that thumbs up button for me subscribe to the channel if you haven't already thanks for watching guys we'll see you again in the next one where are you little cat don't come up here i'm recording stuff please you listen real well here you want to be on camera so bad look there you go now get out of here better be screen recording that'd be stupid if i didn't do that huh we're screen recording in three two [Music]

Channel: Lee Stuart

Views: 33,500

Keywords: lee stuart, leestuart38, vector halftones, adobe illustrator, adobe illustrator for beginners, vector design, illustrator halftones, graphic design, adobe illustrator tutorial, how to make halftones, halftone effect, geometric halftones, halftone gradient, create halftones in illustrator, halftones for screen printing, vector halftone, vector halftone illustrator, how to make halftone in adobe illustrator, halftone tutorial, custom halftone pattern

Id: FwcNgXJgl7Q

Length: 17min 1sec (1021 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 26 2021