Enhanced Stylized Line Art for Pattern Design in Adobe Illustrator Using the Offset Filter

Do you love line art, but wrestle with ideas to develop these into fully realized and interesting pattern designs? Development of advanced techniques with line art in Illustrator is the focus of this course, Enhanced Stylized Line Art for Pattern Design in Illustrator, with the goal of helping you increase your proficiency with Illustrator techniques you may never have considered. You will craft a pleasing and strong floral line-art pattern tile which can be finished in a variety of ways! In this course, you will learn every step, from dealing with negative space issues, adding details, creating a great flow with flower stems, to a cool new technique which mimics the look of an off-register screen-print. And the techniques you will learn can be used for so much more than florals! Think of your favorite things to draw and imagine them as bedding or apparel or anything you see covered in pattern! And again, what you learn here covers many fundamental principles in the general workflow of many surface pattern designers and graphic illustrators. My goal is to have you thinking outside the box so once you complete the course, your head is filled with ideas!

To get started, all you need is an initial drawing to work on. If you haven’t got one on hand, just watch the class for ideas. I have another course, Chic Florals, that can guide you to the creation of your initial drawing. Alternatively, if you have traditional hand-drawn line art and a scanner, you could auto-trace and use that!

In this course, I’m sharing everything I’ve learned about my entire process through trial and error. I’ll show you my step-by-step procedures. Then I will explain my tricks for working with the offset filter to create a full and complex pattern, having the filter do most of the work for us. This course is recommended for artists with a working knowledge of Adobe Illustrator. As long as you know basics, you should be able to follow along, as techniques are explained in detail. You will even learn many creative problem-solving approaches.

You may have taken courses on pattern design before, but it is guaranteed that there are new practices and procedures to be learned every day. If you've taken other Deloresart classes, this is just a natural progression in your artistic development. Start now and you can have completed the class in around an hour, and you could be starting to plan your own future project later today! In fact, like I said, just watch it through from end to end first, just to see how you might want to implement the ideas.

Once you have your repeat pattern done, you can use companies like Spoonflower or Print on Demand sites to print your own wallpaper, fabric or gift wrap, or to create custom products. Or check out my recent course called Passion to Profits where we use the Adobe Design-to Print-Extension and publish straight to Zazzle. Wouldn’t it be fun to make fabric and upholster a chair or make products with your art?

As far as prerequisite skills, I would recommend some knowledge of Illustrator with the goal of wanting to learn additional techniques. In class, we’ll talk about both design and technical aspects of creating a pattern. I will demonstrate them at a reasonable pace so that it will be easy to follow along. This course is for all levels; I recommend being acquainted with Illustrator to a certain degree. I suggest Illustrator is recommended for this class, as that is what is being featured here, but any other vector software is suitable, so long as it has the same functionality.

The key concepts I will include are:

• tips to perfecting your pattern before creating the offset path
• use of the offset filter and all its settings
• many other considerations to do with designing repeating patterns efficiently
• alternative methods to deal with issues
• creating and using temporary guides
• creating good flow within patterns and dealing with negative space issues

This course has a myriad of pointers for you no matter at what stage you are in your design career and can help you even if you are not only into pattern design. Join me and learn an abundance of things you may never have considered before! You can be applying this practical knowledge in your design practice tomorrow. Creating a pattern can be done relatively quickly with this small investment of your time. Let’s get at it! Hit your play button now!

Intro

Lesson 1: Overview, Examples and End Goals

In this lesson, I will explain the goals for the class and I will share examples of my work. We will examine silk-screen print examples to visualize what our end product might look like.

Lesson 2: Dealing with Unbalanced Negative Space

Creating good balance within a pattern can be tricky. In this lesson, we will discuss the issue as it pertains to negative space and I will teach you a few of the strategies I have employed to achieve better balance.

Lesson 3:  Making Some Alterations to the Motifs

In this lesson, we will make some alterations to the pattern to help improve the general flow of the design. This shows some of the steps one might take in the process of perfecting the pattern.

Lesson 4: Additional Details on Stems

We continue with polishing the pattern in this lesson. I will explain some of my tips and tricks with guide-making and you will see me work through a big challenge. The flow of the pattern is discussed further.

Lesson 5: Final Adjustments and Polishing the Pattern

In this lesson, I talk about the testing process and how I use the pattern maker to make incremental steps toward a final, complete pattern. I encourage you to do many tests along the way while trying to perfect the pattern.

Lesson 6: Preparing for Object Fill

We review the process of fine-tuning the positioning of all the elements in our design to further enhance the fit. I share many tid-bits about design, in general, in this lesson. We do final preparations for the color fill in this lesson.

Lesson 7: Method 1 for Color Filling                                     

This lesson will cover the filling the motifs and I will explain the process in great detail so you will be able to follow along easily. Small challenges present themselves and I help you deal with these as best I can.

Lesson 8: Method 2 for Coloring: Live Paint 

In this lesson, we will cover the filling of the motifs using the Live Paint Tool. I explain how to control gap sizes and show you how amazing that is!

Lesson 9: Adding Release Offset Path

This is the lesson where we will be adding a release to the offset path to mimic the look of off-register screen printing. There are a few key steps to making this work.

Lesson 10: Alternative Stylings and Experiments

In this lesson where we will experiment with the release offset path and talk about alternative stylings and ideas for experimenting. My hope is that this gives you a lot to consider with design and fuels your imagination in coming up with great ideas in the future.

Outro and Wrap-Up

I will summarize the class in this lesson and will talk about future classes!

Concepts covered:

Concepts covered include but are not limited to Illustrator line art, Illustrator filters, techniques for enhancing line art, expand and expand appearance, simplify, the live paint tool, making temporary guides, keyboard shortcut reinforcement, offset path, color, the recolour tool in Illustrator, filling gaps, copy, paste, paste in place, paste in front, paste in back, layering, the layers palette, dealing with negative space issues, achieving good balance in a pattern design, correcting motifs, adding detail to illustrator line art, and much more!

You will get the bonus of…

• approx. one hour of direction from an instructor who has been in the graphic design business and education for over 40 years
• awareness of multiple approaches to resolve each design challenge
• handouts explaining key concepts
• a list of helpful online sites to further your education