Quick Tip - Playing with Illustrator Pattern Fills

Key Takeaways

hello Gary Simon here of designc course.com today we're going to be taking a look at pattern fills as a way to uh just add a little bit extra to our illustrations in shapes and designs in general and so uh specifically the ones we're going to be looking at are going to be good for adding uh sort of illustrative line based and dot-based patterns uh in terms of adding Sha Shadows or highlights so uh just go to file new I for my resolution I for this video 859 by 600 points works well at 100% And then for advanced you want to make sure everything is at uh RGB and raster effect screen 72 and you can align new objects to pixel grid hit okay so if I hit control one we'll get to 100% And so the first example I'll give you I I'm going to go ahead and just use the type tool left click and we're just going to type design so I'm going to move to the move tool or selection tool hold shift left click and just scale that up and I'm going to use a font just called new cycle it's free you can find it uh actually that's not the one I wanted there we go Oswald is the one I wanted so you could find that if you just Google it uh no big deal and so just looking at this I let's say for example we wanted to add some sort of Shadow to this you know there's several different ways you could do that you could uh just take contrl C crlf to duplicate it and then select the bottom one down here and then just use your keyboard down and write arrow keys a few times and make it maybe a lighter color like that very simple not much to it uh another way you could do it uh while keeping the same black color here I what we could do is go to over here me find it under this section on this drop down menu open Swatch library now mine is kind of showing off up on the right hand side uh so what where I'm going to basically is patterns and then it comes out basic graphics and then basic dots and basic graph lines so uh the one I want to choose is lines Graphics lines right there and we can see we have all these different uh swatches these presets here uh so if I just click on one of these we'll see see what it does it just fills in that text path or text field with uh these lines so these are thicker and then these are real thin now in and of itself maybe something right around here would maybe work well uh but they actually work well when you combine multiple so let's say we select this one maybe move it up a little bit closer and H contrl C crlf to duplicate it select the bottom one use your down in right arrow keys just a couple times maybe right around there and then use a thinner one and then now you may want to use your down arrow key and right arrow key to get it to uh because they are transparent over each other so if you if you have them aligned incorrectly it'll look kind of cluttered but right there looks pretty good and just kind of an interesting cool effect uh that you could apply to not just type layers like this so let's say for example uh we have a a shape here we'll use the ellipse tool and I'm going to hold shift and ALT and left click and drag out to create a perfect circle and we'll get rid of the fill this time so we can come over here and swatches click that red slash switch to our stroke and we'll give it a black stroke turn up the stroke size and then change our variable width profile which by default is uniform uh to maybe something like uh let's see maybe this one right here so it's just kind of different and how the stroke is applied so then what we go we'll do we object path and we'll outline the stroke all right so it's no longer a path it's or a stroke rather it's a full path and we contrl C and control F and we could do the same thing take this one right there oops I think I'm selecting the text so let me convert that to an outline take the bottom one contr H and and yeah right there contrl c contrl f and move the bottom one let me real quick running into the same problem actually I'll just uh probably use this becoming oh it's because it's applying a stroke there we go there we go that looks a little bit better and we can see it just gives you a nice sort of taper effect over here over here it doesn't look so good uh so once you have these paths filled in you know you can use let's say for example we only wanted to have this show up on the inside and not the outside we could just take the pen tool I'm going to hit contrl H so we can see the paths and no points I come up right around here come up around take the move tool select that along with our two pattern paths holding shift left clicking we'll move it over select the top path object path and divide objects below and then take the direct selection tool and just select somewhere in the middle and hit delete twice then we can move this over and now we can make this so that it only shows up here on the inside but yeah that's the general basic idea of this uh it's just a very quick way of manipulating paths and adding interesting sort of Graphics so another one you could do if we come down here we go to patterns again we could do dots even so they have a lot of cool dots they kind of look like half tones um so when you apply these let me apply maybe a thick one here and then a a less thick one here contrl c contrl f move it down contrl c contrl f move this down that way we could sort of just taper it off but yeah anyhow you can just really experiment with it and you can make it really interesting just by duplicating the layers and then just adding different variations of these so yeah go ahead and explore all of these uh you know they have the patterns but they have so much others here um hopefully my kid that didn't the microphone didn't pick that up she's screaming anyhow uh but yeah just go ahead and experiment with that and hopefully you learn something new that can really drastically uh alter the appearance and the quality of your designs all right so sorry I haven't been updating lately with a lot of content I've been focused on kind of restructuring how I do designc course.com and actually the whole the whole show and such so I look out for more updates in the future and make sure you subscribe here on YouTube and check out designc course.com all right see you later goodbye [Music]