Pattern Tutorial

Hey guys! Today I'll be showing you how to make a basic pattern on Adobe Illustrator.

1. Create an art board, and it's usually a good idea to make your width and height a square 

2. Just for this tutorial I'll make a basic shape and show you how to give it a paper effect. When making the star, press the ~ button in the top left hand corner of your keyboard, if you're on a mac. When you start to drag out, it should start to look like this.

3. Since this specific short cut is creating individual stars, select the whole pattern and group it all together, now we're time for the pattern making.

4. Select the shape and go up to Object > Pattern > Make

5. Illustrator will now take you to pattern mode and you can do a couple different things from here. As you can see on the picture to the right, this panel should come up when you go into pattern mode and first, of course, name your pattern so you can tell them apart.

6. Go to the drop down box in the tile type box and select brick by row, in the future you can choose any of these but for this tutorial I'll just be showing you this one. 

7. In the upper left hand corner of the pattern options box, you'll see a little button that looks like two boxes going away from each other. Click that and now a blue box should show up around your original pattern and you can change the size of that to determine how close or far you want your shapes to be from one another. In the overlap section, feel free to choose which one you would like to be on top of each other or behind each other.

8. You can then press done at the top of the page and the pattern should go away and the original pattern will be there. Select it, and move it out of the way so your able to show your new pattern. Create a normal rectangle on top of the art board and choose a fill color.

9. Over in the swatches panel, you should now see a little version of your pattern. Make another rectangle over the other one and click your pattern in the swatches panel and it should show up over the rectangle! 

I hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial! Happy pattern making!

HTML Colors!

Today we'll be reviewing Hexadecimal codes, RGB, and RGBa. All 3 codes involve colors, but can give them different forms or give them a different look, or also how much we control the shade of the color.

Hexadecimal Codes

Starting off with Hexadecimal codes, you can use letters and numbers, and they can either be 3 or 6 characters. It ranges from 0, being black, to 9 and then A to F, being white. Any of the numbers or letters in between can determine what shade of color you'd like, and usually the characters are in pairs and they can be either red, green, or blue and you can higher or lower the codes on those to establish different colors.

RGB & RGBa Codes

RGB coding involves no pound sign (#), no letters, 3 numbers, and it can go up to the number 255.You can use this for regular coloring, but if you want to add some transparency you can set your settings to RGBA. The only difference is that there are 4 numbers in RGBA, it can go up to the number 225, and the A at the end stands for alpha and is used to determine the transparency. It normally ranges from 0-1. Zero being see through and 1 being almost a completely white background. You can use the numbers in-between, such as 0.2 and 0.8, to determine how much you want to see through your box.

Above is what an RGBa code would look like, you can see the last number, the alpha, is a decimal and since I want my box to be partially see through, I made it a low number and the other 3 numbers just determine what shade I want the background to be.

We need this skill to make websites and we want to make a box with information in it, but have it show through to some pictures in the background. Anyone wishing to have maybe a slideshow in the background or a lighter feeling of their website should use this tool because they can still have information about their website on their page but at the same time being able to see the whole thing.

In conclusion, there are many different ways to use color codes and many different ways you can make them appear.

Below are some websites you can access to make you codes the best of the best:

HTML Color Picker
Color Explanations
RGB Color Channels

My Creative Objects

In my creative pencil, I made a couple different pencils before deciding what parts I liked best and put them together to make a pencil I really liked. My favorite tool was the pen tool because you can draw anything and then you can modify it any way you wish. In my honey and honeycomb design, I got inspiration from Winnie the Pooh and how much he loves honey, and it inspired me to make this honey jar. I used the paint brush tool to get the honey drip on the jar, as well as on the comb.