Illustrator CC - Random Pattern of Shapes - Easy seamless repeating pattern

hello and welcome to this video tutorial today we're looking at creating a random pattern of objects inside adobe illustrator i'm doing this because i saw a video recently on the web which sort of half answered this question but didn't go all the way so i have an object here and you could use any object that you like what i'm going to do is start by making a duplicate of this holding the alt key on a pc option on a mac and just dragging a duplicate away i'm now going to hold down the control key command on a mac and press the letter d and that's going to duplicate the shape down the document i'm going to select over all of these shapes and i'm going to again alt and drag a duplicate away and now i'm going to do the same thing ctrl or command d a few times to make a number of repeated objects now it's probably simplest to do it this way simply because we want every one of these objects to be an individual object just a note that these are a group of objects so that i can just click on the group and select them you will need to make sure that whatever object you're working with is grouped otherwise things are going to get crazy and just not function at all really really quickly so the next thing that we're going to do is select over all of these shapes and we're randomly transforming them so with them selected we'll go to object transform and then transform each again this is why you need each of these objects that each of these umbrellas or whatever it is that you're using to be a group because if you don't this transform each command is going to isolate every single one of these shapes and transform every one of them differently what we want is the entire umbrella to be dealt with differently so i'm going to select here on random and i'm going to decrease the scale because i want some of those to be smaller so i'm going to bring the horizontal and vertical down to the exact same value that's really important because what's happening here is we're saying to illustrator we want you to scale these horizontally and vertically to the same amount but do it randomly so there will be some that will be 85 percent and 85 percent there'll be some that'll be ninety percent and ninety percent some that are just left at a hundred percent i think this is still a bit big so i'm going to drop this to seventy percent but again really important that if i want these umbrellas to stay looking regular shapes that i set the horizontal and vertical scale to the exact same value now i would like to rotate these a little bit so let's just play with the rotation and you can choose as much or as little rotation as you like i'm just a little bit concerned that these are a little bit too upright but i don't want to flip them over but you could if you wanted to so you could go and flip them in all sorts of directions i would like them to stay basically up the right but a bit more angled in terms of movement movement is really handy too so i'm going to move these something like about 26 pixels here the vertical and horizontal movement amounts don't have to be the same that's fine but what we want to do is to start breaking these out of the really obvious grid pattern that we've got so i'm going to call this good and just click ok now i think a few of these umbrellas might be nice if they were flipped so i'm going to click on one and i'm going to hold down the control key as i click on a few others that i can flip around i'm looking for ones that are sort of upright and i want to add a few of them to my selection and i'll choose object transform and then choose reflect and we're going to reflect over the vertical now this has moved these i'm not really too concerned about i'll just click ok because it's very easy to come back here and just find these and move them back okay so i'm pretty happy with that and this is the point pretty much at which the other person who created this pattern came to and they just called this a pattern the problem is it doesn't repeat particularly well so what we're going to do is select over all of these shapes i'm going to choose object and then pattern then make click ok i'm going to hide the swatches panel here i'm also going to hide my artboard so i'm going to view and i'll come down here to hide artboards just makes like for a little bit easier also going to the zoom tool i'm going to zoom back out again so that we can see what's going on here now in the pattern options dialog i'm selecting from the copies list here 9x9 because that allows me to see lots of these umbrellas on the screen and i can begin to see if my pattern is a little bit too grid like so i'm going to turn off tile edge and i am seeing some fairly strong vertical and horizontal lines here i knew i would because this is not really a sophisticated pattern but it can be made sophisticated pretty easily what i'm going to do is start moving a few of these umbrellas just up a little bit so that they break over the edge the top edge of the pattern box here and then we could move a few to the side so if i move this one to the side you'll see that over this side it's starting to run into this one but we can just move them all along a little bit so i imagine that probably five or ten minutes in this box is going to give you a more sophisticated pattern as soon as you can break out over these edges a little bit then you're going to get something where the edges are not so visible where you don't see this sort of white rivers running through your pattern so just work here at either moving things up over the edge or down over this edge and when you move something down you'll probably have to move these down here as well just make sure that you don't do what i just did and smoosh your shape as you move it you can of course just flip these a little bit or rotate them a little bit depending on what you're feeling is here if they're perhaps rotated around too much and then turn the tile edge off when you're just checking your pattern to see if it's looking okay you can use the zoom tool to zoom out so you can see more of your pattern now at some point with absolutely any pattern you're going to see some vertical and horizontal lines it's pretty much impossible with designs like this to avoid that but you want to sort of look at it at the size that you plan to use it at now also a little bit of a wake-up call here when you use this pattern dialog i suggest that you deselect this so that when you hover over it says maintain width and height so you want to deselect that option and then just go and make the width and height whole numbers because patterns work a whole lot better when they're whole numbers they're less likely to have fracture lines in them later on as soon as you're happy with this just click done and you can now get rid of these objects or you can do whatever you like with them i'm not able to see my artboard yet because remember we turned it off so i'm going to come down here and do show artboards i'm going to make sure that the artboard fills the screen now my document started out being 1920 by 1080. yours might be a different size just fill a shape that is the artboard size with your patterns i'm just going to square this up on the artboard let's bring the fill to the front and go to the swatches panel where we're going to find our pattern and of course if we want to scale a pattern we'll choose object and then transform and scale here i'm going to turn off transform objects because my shape is the perfect size it's the pattern that's a problem i'd like to bring this down to 60 i'm just going to type in 60 and we've got a pattern that is a reduced size i'll click ok as with every pattern in illustrator if you've got it inside a shape if you fill the shape of the pattern you can also recolor it so i'm going to the recolor artwork dialog here i'm going to click on advanced options i'm going to click on edit all these colors are linked together so i can walk this around to change the colors in my pattern i want to unlink the colors i can do that and then i can take the colors into different places so it's very easy to create another colored version of your pattern when you change the color of patterns like this in illustrator using this recolor artwork dialog on a shape that is filled with your pattern you actually get the original pattern and this new colored version so you don't have to make duplicates of the pattern illustrator takes care of that itself and so you can just go ahead and make multiple colored versions of your pattern really easily but this is a random pattern created inside illustrator i think it's just a little bit more sophisticated a pattern than the one i saw in the other person's video before we finish up i have more illustrator training at skillshare.com if you sign up for skillshare you'll get access to thousands of classes there including over 250 of mine in the description below is a skillshare coupon for you which is at least as good as the current skillshare offer and typically mine will be better i also have illustrator training at udemy.com and there's a referral link for every one of these courses in the description below please feel free to share these with family friends and co-workers i hope you've enjoyed this video learned things about illustrator of which you were previously unaware if you did enjoy the video please give it a thumbs up hit the subscribe button and that notification bell so you can be alerted when new videos are released until next time my name's helen bradley thank you so much for joining me here on my youtube channel

Channel: Helen Bradley

Views: 38,194

Keywords: Helen Bradley, illhbgrp13, adobe illustrator, adobe illustrator patterns, adobe illustrator tutorial, Random Pattern in Adobe Illustrator, create patterns in adobe illustrator, how to fill object with objects, repeating pattern in illustrator, how to make random abstract pattern, how to make random pattern, illustrator CC, random objects in adobe illustrator, random pattern illustrator, randomize pattern, seamless background, seamless pattern, seamless repeating pattern

Id: NhC5pv4yBuw

Length: 10min 3sec (603 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 07 2022