- [Narrator] In this movie we'll express these waving lines
as a seamlessly repeating tile pattern.
Now you may wonder why at this point, after all
we're already filling the screen with the seamless effect,
but if I press Control + 0, or Command + 0 on a Mac,
you can see that a lot of the artboard is left uncovered,
and we might want to create a pattern that we can apply
to a vertical piece of artwork as well.
And that's where tile patterns come in very handy.
Now if we refer to the diagram again,
you can see the distance between the crest of one wave
and the crest of the next is 300 points,
which means that our pattern needs to measure
300 points wide as well as 300 points tall. Why tall?
Because in addition to the horizontal waves,
we have those bright vertical waves.
I'm going to go ahead and press Control + A,
or Command + A on a Mac,
to select all of the artwork, and then I'll go up
to the Object menu, choose Pattern, and choose Make,
or if you loaded dekeKeys, you have that shortcut
of Control + M here on a PC, or Command + M on a Mac.
Now by default you're going to see some very large width
and height values which are going to preclude
any kind of seamless repetition whatsoever.
And so what you want to do is select the width value
and change it to 300 points, and then tab
to the height value and change it to 300 points as well.
Do not turn on Size Tile to Art, because that's just going to
mess things up, as we're seeing here.
So again, I'll turn that check box off and return
both the values to 300 points.
Now we're seeing some kind of wacky repetition
at this point, which is why I'm going
to call this guy bad pattern, even though
what we're currently seeing is not quite accurate.
Then, I'll press the Escape key
in order to exit the pattern editor,
and create that new pattern swatch.
Now let's employ the pattern by creating
a new layer which you can do by Alt or Option clicking
on the little page icon at the bottom of the Layers panel,
and I'll call this layer pattern, and then I'll change
its color to something like gold, and click OK.
Now you want to select the rectangle tool,
then make sure your smart guides are turned on,
which you can do by going to the View menu,
and if you don't see a check mark,
choosing the Smart Guides command,
and then I'll draw a rectangle from one corner
of the red bleed boundary to the other,
in order to create, in my case, a big white rectangle.
I want it to be filled with our pattern, however,
and so I'll click on the Fill Swatch and select bad pattern,
at which point I get this.
Now, there's a couple of problems with it.
One is the most obvious one, that we have
these weird little triangles right here.
And those appear over and over again.
But that's not actually our biggest problem.
Notice instead of these wonderful, bright, vertical waves,
that our vertical waves appear white,
and that's because they're getting duplicated
over and over again on top of each other,
which is why we need to contain
our waves inside of a clipping mask.
And so I'll go ahead and turn off
the pattern layer for the moment,
and then I'll select the expanded layer,
click on the fly-out menu icon
in the top right corner of the Layers panel
and choose Duplicate expanded.
Then you want to turn off the original expanded layer,
very important, we don't want to mess it up,
and then double-click on an empty portion of expanded copy,
in order to bring up the Layer Options dialogue box.
Let's go ahead and call this guy cropped,
and I'll change the color to grass green, and then click OK.
Now I need to bring back my guides,
so I'll turn on the guides layer,
and now you want to position your cursor
at the exact intersection of all four of those guidelines,
and press the Alt key, or the Option key on a Mac,
and click, in order to bring up
the Rectangle dialogue box, and then set both the width
and height values to 300 points exactly, and click OK.
In my case, this rectangle comes in filled
with the bad pattern, and that doesn't really matter
because we're going to lose that fill in just a second.
Just go ahead and press Control + A, or Command + A
on a Mac, in order to select all of your artwork,
and then go to the Object menu, drop all the way down
to Clipping Mask, and click Make, or you have
that shortcut of Control + 7, or Command + 7 on a Mac,
at which point you'll have cropped your pattern.
Now let's turn this guy into a pattern tile
by going to the Object menu, choosing Pattern,
and once again choosing Make.
And this time, by the way, you can turn on Size Tile to Art
and Illustrator will size the pattern automatically.
You want to leave your Tile Type set to Grid, by the way,
anything else is going to mess up the effect,
as we can see if I choose Brick by Row,
that's going to totally mess things up.
We won't have any seams going left to right,
but we will have seams up and down.
So, go ahead and stick with grid,
and then name your pattern. I'm going to call mine
waving 300x300, like so,
and then press the Enter key to accept that change,
and press the Escape key to create your new pattern.
Now, I'll turn off the crop layer
and turn on the pattern layer.
I'll also turn off the guides layer
so you can better see what's going on.
I'll press the V key to switch to the black arrow tool
and I'll click on a rectangle to select it,
and then I'll return to this first swatch
on the far left side of the control panel,
and I will select waving 300x300,
to produce this absolutely impeccable effect here.
I'll press Control + Shift + A,
or Command + Shift + A on a Mac, to deselect the artwork.
I'll press Control + 0, or Command + 0 on a Mac,
just so you can see that we're filling the entire artboard,
and I'll press the F key a couple of times
to switch to the full-screen mode,
and I'll go ahead and zoom on in.
And that's how you create an absolutely impeccable
seamlessly repeating tile pattern with the help
of an old school clipping mask here inside Illustrator.