Make a Seamless Repeat Pattern with the NEW Repeats Feature in Illustrator
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 มี.ค. 2021
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The Repeat feature from Adobe Illustrator on the iPad is now available on the desktop in Illustrator 2021! This tutorial shows you how to create a repeat pattern in Illustrator using Object + Repeat + Grid. I love this feature, it works almost the same on the desktop version of Illustrator as it does on the iPad. The main difference is in the experience of editing the pattern. On the desktop, use Isolation mode to drill down into the Grid Repeat and any groups contained within, as displayed on the breadcrumb trail at the top of the Illustrator window. On the iPad, you double tap, but the process does not include the breadcrumb trail or a changing Layers panel, it's actually a little more intuitive.
Either way, the new Repeat pattern feature in Illustrator is very useful, fun and fast! Let me know what you think.
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This is a dream feature for pattern designers . Thanks Laura for letting us know. Great
I agree! You are so welcome!
Great feature. Thanks for making it look so easy Laura 👍🏼
Thanks so much 😊
Hi Laura, thank you for all your videos. I am new-ish to Illustrator and they are really easy to follow.
You are so welcome!
Thank you for sharing this! I needed this tutorial. Off to make cool patterns!
Wonderful!
Thanks Laura! Great video. You have a great way of explaining the information.
You are so welcome!
Great tutorial Laura! Can't wait to give it a whirl.
Have fun Kathleen!
Thank you for this terrific set of tutorials. I watched several today. Your instructions are so clear and inspiring.
One request: Please do post an update video if Illustrator ever adds a way to export a repeat swatch directly from the new repeat pattern mode. That seems like such an obvious thing for Adobe to have added, and yet as far as I can tell it is not there.
Thanks so much for the donation, @antiqueimages ! 😁 I'm glad you like the video. And, yes, when Adobe adds that functionality to Illustrator, I will be celebrating 🎉. I'll make a video too. It's frustrating they don't have an easy way to do this.
Thank you, saved me lot of time, great explanation of the breadcrumb path, it's so much easier now.
Thank you, that's great to hear!
It was such a cool alternative to the pattern option! It also can be used for other purposes. Thanks!
You are so welcome!
Just seeing this tutorial a year later. Thank you so much! Big Help and a time saver creating the repeat including multiple repeat styles.
Glad it helped! Yes, that feature is so much fun.
Awesome! Thanks for the video, had no idea about this feature.
Happy to help!
You did an amazing job. easy to follow.
Thank you!!
Thank you for the tutorial
You’re welcome 😊
I love you for sharing this information
Glad it was helpful!
Thanks Laura, great video! amazing!
Glad it was helpful!
Thank you - very good tutorial.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Can’t believe I didn’t know about this before. Thanks for sharing!!
Happy to help!
Thank you for this information :)
My pleasure!
Wow, I did not know this was even here! Can't wait to try it out.
Hope you like it!
So helpful!
Glad you think so! Thanks
Great video thank you. 😍
You are so welcome!
Are you kidding me!?! I've been doing this the old fashioned way all this time, this makes things so much easier!
LOL! Yes, it's a lot easier ;-), not as flexible as some methods, but it's pretty amazing.
Thank you!
You're welcome!
really great feature..thanks!!!! :-)
Glad you like it!
Great tutorial! Question - is there a way to export the actual repeat from this mode? As in...I want a repeating tile pattern to give to a client or upload for fabric printing....how would I go about doing that?
Thank you!! Not that I know of, it has to be done manually unfortunately. This video shows that process: th-cam.com/video/gA6xD4LvmDs/w-d-xo.html I wish it were simpler, but I hope that helps!
This is great! Hope it works with what I want to do!! Thank you so much for sharing!!
Best of luck!
Great tutorial thanks?
Is possible maybe to kinda flatten the pattern and paint individual shapes across all art board with live paint bucket?
When you expand these repeats there will be a clipping mask enclosing the art, so you will need to go to Object > Clipping Mask > Release first. Then, you can select the art, click on it with the Live Paint Bucket to make the art a Live Paint group - and then you can color with Live Paint.
@@LauraCoyle Thanks, will give it a try.
Cool! Thanks for the info! Question; How do I save my new repeat pattern into the swatches panel?
Good question! See this video where I show how to do that: th-cam.com/video/gA6xD4LvmDs/w-d-xo.html
@@LauraCoyle Thanks!
Wat a wonderful tutorial.Enjoyed it every bit.Just curious which version of illustrator is this.Is this a plugin we need to install.I use Adobe illustrator CC.
No need to install a plugin, this is part of Illustrator 2021.
Laura, thanks so much for the tutorial. I was wondering if this could be defined as pattern? Thanks once again!
You're welcome! Yes, but you will need to use the art you started with to make a pattern fill swatch in Pattern editing mode. I'll do another video on this. In the meantime, select the repeat, choose Object > Repeat > Release and takes you back to the original art. Then, you can select the original art and choose Object > Pattern > Make, to bring it into Pattern Editing mode and work with it there, fine-tune it and create a Pattern fill swatch. If you used grid repeat in the Repeat feature it's easy. Brick (half drop) is easy too, you can select those in PEM. If you flipped rows, it becomes more work that you need to do manually because those aren't button presses inside PEM.
@@LauraCoyle hello, is it possible to do something like this in the repeat in illustrator for iPad ? Thanks
The feature in the video is identical top the one on the iPad, but to make an individual repeat tile that you can send to a fabric printer, etc, you would have to work it out manually on the iPad on an artboard. Pattern Editing Mode is only a desktop feature. If you know how to make a pattern tile manually by making sure the edges line up and the corners are identical, that would be the way to do it on the iPad. You could use the Repeat feature to preview and design first, then expand and work manually. Hope that makes sense!
Is there any advantage to this method over the Ai pattern maker feature? I wish you could use the blob brush and eraser in pattern maker to make continuous swirly designs. And I wish it supported layers too!
There are advantages and disadvantages. In this repeat feature, there are no layers, there is no set tile size - the tile grows to fit the art. I agree, 🙌 I wish we had layers for pattern making and not have to worry about the art getting expanded, be able to use all our tools, and have an easier time getting a finished repeat tile out of Pattern mode... Adobe are you listening?
Thanks
You're welcome
Thank you for demonstrating this repeat option! My question is how can I use these repeat patterns to post on websites. For example, if I download them from my files, will the patterns repeat just as the ones created the usual way by dropping patterns in the swatches?
You're welcome! If you need a single unit, one tile of the pattern, and that tile is going to be repeated by the code on the web page, it will take some extra steps in Illustrator. Neither feature (the new Repeats feature or Pattern mode) can automatically give you a single unit of the repeat. There are more steps to it, than I can give you in a comment unfortunately! :-) Dragging a fill swatch to the artboard is the first step.
@@LauraCoyle Thank you! I am doing surface pattern designs without too much trouble [now!], but your method looks so much easier. I am severely right-brain dominant, so AI is a monster. 🙂
@@connectiondiva Ha! You can do it!!
Hello thank you for the video, may I ask? How to export it or send it to make a print (what file do we send to the printing company) sorry for my bad english
It all depends on what the printer requires - the size, the resolution and RGB vs CMYK. To export, use File > Export.
Hi Laura, I remember you! We were both represented by Alexander Pollard way back when. Nice to see your work again! Cheers, Diane Dempsey
Hey, thanks! I hope you are well, Diane! I loved working with Kiki Pollard. I love your retro Christmas cards!
Hey Laura, It looks like you are a technical whiz kid now. I wonder do you have a tutorial on creating and printing editable address labels? It has me totally stumped.@@LauraCoyle
Sorry, I don't have one about that. You could look up Variable Data Merge in Illustrator - it can take spreadsheet data and feed it into your label template document. Good luck!!
thanks great video, but how can we extract patterns or break it?
Maybe this video will help? th-cam.com/video/gA6xD4LvmDs/w-d-xo.html
Is there a way to make it seamless? Thanks for the tutorial.
Yes, You'll need to use Pattern Mode for that - I'm planning to do that tutorial. Make a copy of the Repeat object, then with the copy go to Object > Repeat > Release to get one unit of the art, then select it and Object > Pattern > Make, and recreate in Pattern Editing Mode. Repeats feature is great for concepting and playing, Pattern Mode is better for final.
Great tool but it doesn't seem to work very well with clipping masks for me? Do I need to actually delete / crop anything that overlaps the border to avoid any gaps in between the tiles when using the repeat tool?
You can control the spacing between the tiles by dragging the handles on the top and left of the repeat bounding box. This is how you would close up gaps if you are using clipping masks.
@@LauraCoyle Thank you!
Thank you for your videos Laura! Someone linked me to them yesterday and they are so concise and really great. I loved the one watched yesterday about removing so many anchor points on my artwork. I am new to Ai and really want to pursue SPD further and so will be watching all you have to offer. I only work on a PC at the moment so have no luxury of an iPad (yet) :) I was playing myself with this new repeat feature in Ai and ended up with some quite cool designs from the radial repeat selection but didn't see there was handles to move etc. When you talk about using Pattern Editing mode - are you talking about making a repeat pattern the way I have been taught, by using a bounding board and copying edges over etc etc such that you can then finalise it and drag it to the swatch panel? I've not been shown PEM. You say that we cannot create new swatch design copies using this new repeat feature, is that true? I have just looked at Ai and seen that under Window > Pattern Edit there seems to be a panel to do something there which I will explore? Is this pattern editing mode you mean? Or do you mean Object> Pattern > Make? Do you already have a video making repeats via Pattern Mode? I want to learn so much and I have to be careful I don't rabbit hole or scattergun learn and end up with holes in my processes :) Thanks again!
So glad you like the videos! So yes, you found the PEM by going to Object > Pattern > Make. This feature has been around since version CS6 and it's a live updating way to create a pattern fill swatch. You move a motif and you can see it move in the surrounding tiles. And also, the new repeats feature, Object > Repeat > Grid, does not create a pattern fill swatch automatically like PEM. You would have to expand the repeat and figure out where the tile boundaries are and make it manually (or bring motifs into PEM) - I use Repeat for quickly previewing, getting ideas.I have a whole (very thorough) class on using PEM on my website. The way you have been taught that you describe, is just making it manually on the artboard, so there's a big difference between that and PEM, but it's an important skill to know how to make repeat tiles manually. So we have 3 ways of making repeats in Illustrator now: manually, Object > Pattern and Object > Repeat > Grid. Hope that helps!
@@LauraCoyle thank you for your reply Laura. Yes that really helps. Great to learn new things each day!
Can you place your pattern in a box as a single repeat layout? So anyone can see where the pattern starts and ends without showing the repeat?
With the repeats feature, you could drag the large handles to make the area the size of one repeat, but it would be hard to be accurate - maybe with smart guides, and then you have to account for any brick or flipping you applied. You might be better off using Pattern mode for that, or doing it manually. The repeats feature is not what I would use for final art, but maybe as a way of previewing.
How do you go about saving this so it repeats? Most repeating patterns I've used have the artwork stretched to the size of canvas. I noticed you left a blue border around yours.
In this video I'm working on a repeat object (leaf pattern) that has a separate blue rectangle placed behind it, which is not part of the repeat object - it's there for visualizing. You can resize the repeat object using the handles to be the exact size of the rectangle if you need that. If you want to make a pattern fill swatch, this is a different feature - the Repeats feature does not create fill swatches. For this, you may want to work in Pattern Editing Mode (Object > Pattern> Make). Here's a video where I show you how to take something created with the Repeats feature and re-create it in the Pattern Mode feature: th-cam.com/video/gA6xD4LvmDs/w-d-xo.html
Hlo mam can we do the same for png images also..
You want to use the Repeat feature with a png? I think you might have to create a symbol from the png first. Drag it into the symbols panel, and then try.
Thx a lot 🙏 mam...
This feature doesn't work for me.. The options are grayed out
They will be grayed out if nothing is selected, or if the selection can't be made into a Repeat.
@@LauraCoyle Confused on this as well. I have a jpg of a scan, and it will only offer a repeat if I trace and expand. Unfortunately, the trace and expand completely changes the look of the drawing. Any insight on what I am missing?
🤯
😁