Hi Everyone! So here’s a new topic- I’m trying to learn illustrator. I’ve kind of gone back and forth with it a few times and it’s not as intuitive to me as Photoshop, but this year I am determined to learn it a bit more.
In this case, I had an image that I had created in Photoshop and made a pattern out of it- a grid / repeating pattern. I brought it into illustrator and traced it in order to turn it into a vector object, and then was able to color it and chose a cream fill. I wanted to use this pattern with Illustrator’s blend modes, although they are not as cool or robust as Photoshops. Still, I felt it would be a good learning exercise and whoo-boy, was I right! Here and in the video, I explain what I was trying to accomplish and how I had to jump through hoops to accomplish it!
I had the pattern, created in Photoshop and traced in Illustrator now as a Vector object with a cream fill. I decided, oh, maybe it’ll look cool if it had an outline/stroke. However, when the stroke is placed it is not only on the interior shapes, but it ends up on the edges of that object as well. When you bring a stroked object into the Create Pattern tool in Illustrator the pattern now has lines/stroke down the middle of the repeats, which obviously looks awful. So I tried to figure out a way to get rid of those extraneous strokes at the edges.
The hack I use is to erase those strokes at the edges. It can be a little bit tedious, but it’s not too bad because there’s generally not a ton of exterior lines, at least for the stuff I’ve been working on so far. I just go along using the Eraser tool to erase into the shape and in the video you can see you’re not really getting rid of that stroke- you’re just moving it inward. All you’re trying to do is make sure that that black line is not at the edge of your shape.
Then I will add the original traced shape above this erased object. What I’m left with is the illusion that I have a lined/stroked image without the lines showing up at the repeat edge. Note that in the video, I hadn’t saved a copy of the original traced vector image, so I needed to go through and trace it again, and then fill with cream in order to be able to do the layering in this step.
However, you can see that in some places the lines/strokes actually go over the original image edge. I found this in Photoshop too. If I add a drop shadow or things like that, it just appears that Adobe isn’t able to handle edges of repeats very well. At this point if you select the two layers and choose Object-> Pattern-> Make, you’ll see that the repeat doesn’t line up properly because of those little bits of the line popping out over the bounding box for the original object. The original was 8.5 by 11 inches, which translates to 612 by 792 points and I thought I could go through and just crop those lines down to the size of the rectangle, in order to get rid of those overlapping bits.
However in the video you can see that doesn’t work. The workaround that I found was to select the two layers: the original cream colored traced shape, and then the lined/stroked version that I erased. I then rasterize them into one image. The next step is to retrace it. I trace it as colors not black and white. In general, most times when I do a trace I go into the Advanced settings and I turn on Ignore White, but in this case don’t. I choose three colors, at least in this image, because I have the black outline, the white background, and then the cream insides/fill.
I turn on preview to see what it looks like. In the video you’ll see that I did not choose the advanced settings to increase the path and curves adjustments. I liked it with the less exact tracing, because it was a little more artsy looking. Finally, I expanded the trace so I was back to an illustrator vector, a single group now, and there are still no lines at the at the repeat edges. Perfect.
At this point, I use a rectangle that I already created that was the same size as the original pattern image. I align it with the new, traced image, select both and choose Pathfinder-> Crop.
And all looks good this time- the crop doesn’t mess up the coloring and doesn’t mess up the lines. This cropped version is what I will select and then choose Object-> Pattern-> Make to turn it into the pattern. I think it should look perfect, but it doesn’t. And so there’s still some space in there caused by a few points kind of bumping out over the edges. At this point, rather than going back in and trying to clean up again, I just do it directly in the pattern make. I try editing the Pattern Width since it was off by a hair, but that still didn’t seem to fix it. Finally, I decided to change the repeat border manually. I really had to zoom in to see what I was doing. Also, if you zoom in, you can tweak it a little bit more easily, especially if you’re closing it by a hair. At this point I click Done to cement that pattern as it is onto the Swatch Panel.
The next step was to create a rectangle and fill it with the new pattern from the Swatch Panel. I like to scale it down during my test to make sure it looks okay. I use the Scale tool (Object-> Transform->Scale or S, Enter) and I turn off Transform Object in that tool and turn on Transform Pattern.
I am now at the stage where I am thinking of re-coloring the artwork. But before I start the next step, I make copies of the layers into a new one, and sometimes I create a new artboard also and put them there. This way I have a backup. In general as I work I make copies of the objects at a stage where things are where I want them, and before I go on to the next operation where I might attempt to change/edit them and that might possibly not work. This way if the next step doesn’t work, I can go back to the previous objects in the last condition in which they worked. I could always do an undo, but sometimes it’s just easier to create copies and then, if you get several steps down the road, and you forget what you did, you can kind of just start over. So that’s how I work. I can then go back and clean up layers later if I need to.
Besides re-coloring the pattern I also wish to enable just the lines/strokes to be an entity unto itself. I show you why one way won’t work and ultimately what I did to allow for that. I show you 2 different ways of coloring the objects.
In the first method I go back to the stage where I just have the layered objects- the group that had the fill and strokes that were erased and the original vector object that was just the fill. I change the stroke of the erased group and change the fill of the top object that is layered over it. This will work, but at this stage it is before the crop and so when you go to make the pattern, the pattern edges may need to be tweaked. I also show you that once you create the pattern, you can double click on the pattern in the swatches panel and within the Pattern editing tool you can use Recolor Artwork to change the colors. I chose a swatch group and cycled through the color choices using the random color button. I forgot to mention that you could also just click on the assigned colors and change those directly so you have a bit more control over the actual color choice. When you are finished with the colors, click OK and then Save a Copy and then Cancel. This will create a new pattern with the new colors, but leave the original one untouched.
In the second idea for coloring the artwork I mention that I also wanted the pieces pulled apart so I would have just the fill (which was the original), just the strokes, or both together and be able to make patterns from any of those. In order to do that, I needed to rasterize and re-trace an additional time to get the two layered groups into a single object with no funky edges (as the erased group had) or strokes at the pattern box edge (which was my original dilemma), Once I had this new group, I made a copy of it and proceeded to break apart the Object into groups of the individual colors. In this case, the object has 3 colors- the white background, the stroke, and the fill. I select the cropped object and double click on one of the white pieces which brings me into isolation mode. Then from the Select Menu I choose Same->Fill. It may take a few attempts at this as this doesn’t appear to work as easily with complex objects as others make it seem. I may be doing it wrong since I am a newbie at Illustrator, but I finally get it to work.
At this point I have selected all the white pieces and choose Edit->Cut (CTRL-X) and paste them on a new layer. Then I click Object->Group (CTRL-G) and rename it to Background. It is helpful at this stage to turn off visibility of this background group.
I return to the original Object and double click on a piece of the fill color. I once again Select-> Same-> Fill to select all the cream objects. And again I’m going Cut and Paste In Front onto my new layer. They are still all selected so I again group them and then rename the group to Fill. I then return to the group that was the cropped image, and select the remaining paths which will be the strokes. Once again I’m going Cut and Paste In Front onto my new layer. They are still all selected so I again group them and then rename the group Strokes.
This new layer should have groups of the 3 colors from the previous vector object/group. I can make copies of these groups, select each group and pick colors from the swatch panel to change their colors to my hearts content.
At this stage if you followed what I did I took a Photoshop image that was already a repeating pattern, and did the following:
- traced to get the original rasterized image to a vector object. Let’s call this VO1
- changed fill to cream and stroke to black
- made a copy of this, VO1 and call it VO2.
- erased the lines at the edges of the vector object VO2.
- copied VO1 again and layer in front of VO2 (the erased object)
In order to try to get rid of extraneous points going past the pattern bounding box, I wished to crop it using the size of the original Photoshop image. To do this I did the following:
- made a copy of the layered objects VO1 and VO2
- rasterized those layered objects together into one raster image
- traced this using 3 colors and not selecting Ignore white
- I am left with a single group of paths that has the white background, the cream fill and the black strokes that are not along the bounding box edge
- Lets call this VO3
- Created a rectangle the same size as the bounding box of the original pattern, which was 8.5X11 inches,
- Selected the rectangle and the VO3 object and chose Pathfinder-> Crop
- Lets call this VO_Crop
- Used this with Object->Pattern-> Make to turn it into a pattern.
In order to easily recolor the resulting Object I showed multiple ways:
- Started with Vo1 and VO2 layered and just changed VO1 stroke and VO2 fill
- Started with pattern and got into pattern edit. I selected the pieces of the pattern and used Re-Color Artwork to cycle through different swatches and colors within those swatches. For more control, change the colors that the original colors are assigned to. Remember to choose Make a Copy, and then choose Cancel so the original pattern is left untouched.
- Started with VO_Crop and clicked into isolation mode for each color that makes up the group, and then Select-> Same -> Fill. I cut and paste the selected pieces into a new layer, group and rename the group. I do this first for the white background. then for the Fill color, and what is left is the Strokes. With each of the colors in their own group I can re-color the groups anyway I like.
This is how I solved my problem of not being able to have a setting that turns off lines at the edges of a bounding box for the object. Enjoy!
