Class Project 10 - Drawing amazing repeating shapes in Adobe Illustrator CC (Design a lovely repeating shape graphic)

Hi there, in this tutorial we're going to make these pretty things. We're going to step, repeat, make some symmetry, add some colors. They're pretty easy, they look really nice. Let's learn how to do them now in Adobe Illustrator.

I'm starting with just a blank page. There's nothing special about it. We're going to start with the shape. Now, I'm going to use this Star Tool, it's hiding underneath the Rectangle Tool. You can use any shape, totally any shape. This gives you just different effects. Now I'm not even going to change this Star Tool. I'm just going to use whatever the default is.

So with the 'Star Tool' selected, I need to-- it kind of defaults to white, so I'm going to start with what you've got. My first star needs to be quite big. I've zoomed out a little bit. I want it to kind of cover the whole page because I'm going to crop it at the end, kind of tidy it up. So a nice big star. With the Stroke, I'd like to change it to 'None' and with the Fill, we need a 'gradient'. We need a Radial gradient. There's no Radial gradient default but there is a Linear gradient. We'll start with that one, then we can click on 'Gradient Options'.

If you can't see Gradient Options just go up to 'Window Menu' along the top there. You'll find Gradient there. Same, same. Now in here, I'd like to change Linear to 'Radial'. The way I did mine, I started dark in the middle and light around the outside. It doesn't matter which way you use. If you want to copy my version-- so the inside, which is currently white, I'd like it to get the darker of the colors. I'm using RGB, I'm going to go down here, and pick kind of a, quite a dark green in the inside and the outside, I'm going to pick something a bit lighter. I'll pick some of the same kind of Hue. It's been ages. Come on Dan, pick a color, people are waiting. That will do. Not my favorite, but you get the idea.

So, I've got my colors, I'm going to close down my 'Gradient Panel'. Now, there's two steps to this magic. First of all, with it selected, with my 'Black Arrow', go up to 'Object', 'Transform' and there's this one here that says, 'Transform Each'. Click on this. Now by default, yours is-- mine's defaulting to what I last did. I'm going to put in all the 0s back. Yours is going to look like this, probably. And what I'd like to do is make it a little bit smaller, and rotate it. All at the same go. I could do this separately but it makes this trick not work. You'll see in the next step.

So I would like to make it slightly smaller. It doesn't have to, you don’t have to follow me, I just picked 90. In terms of the angle, it rotates around. It doesn't really matter again. Just pick anything. Everyone give it different effects, you can copy me if you like. Now the trick here is to make sure you click on the 'Copy' button. So if I click 'OK', it's transformed this, made it small, and rotated it. What I'd like to do at the same time, is do that, but make a copy. Watch what happens, when I click 'Copy' the original one's still there but there's another version that's slightly smaller and slightly more rotated. That's the getting started bit.

Now we need to repeat that over and over again. We could go back to Transform Each, but there's a better option. If we go to 'Object', actually, have this one selected, go to 'Object'. There's 'Transform', and there's one called 'Transform Again'. What it's going to do, is it's going to remember the last thing we did, whatever it was. In our case, it was smaller, and rotated. So I'm going to click it. Did it again, 'Object', 'Transform', 'Transform Again'. You can keep doing that. Now, we go and-- we'll go insane if we have to keep going down to the drop down menu. You can see here, on my Mac, it's 'Command D' or 'Control D', on a PC. So I'm going to go 'Command D', and just keep smashing away at that button. It's cool, huh! I love it!

Every time I do that-- I teach this quite a bit, and it's just hard. Every time I say something special about this repeating flowery pattern. Now, yours will look slightly different, because you might use a different star. You might start with different colors. So what I'd like to do now is I'd like you to open another document, and start with a different shape. It could be a triangle, it could be some sort of liquefied thing or something you've drawn and spun around. I'd love to see it. It's a Class Project. I'd like to see it in the comments, I'd like to see it in the project part.

A couple of things that I might do. Actually, when you're doing it, say you start with a star, it might be that you do this to it, this is quite cool. 'White Arrow', remember, we've got all these points I might drag one of these in. You can start with kind of a squidgy star before. It's technical squidgy star. One thing we might do, I might stick it up here, because I'm going to crop it. I'm going to grab the 'Rectangle Tool'. I'm going to draw a rectangle that kind of snaps to the edges. Doesn't matter if it's got a gradient in it, I'm going to select it all. Remember, over here, I'm going to go to 'Make Clipping Mask'. Just kind of tidies it up into some sort of abstract background now.

That is it for binning things around, and making abstract awesomeness. All right, let's get into the next video.