Creating a Pattern Making Workspace in Adobe Illustrator Pattern Making in Adobe Illustrator CC

Author:

PatternLab London

Keywords:

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Subtitles:

hey guys welcome to part one of many in our courses about pattern cutting in Adobe Illustrator okay it's a really very very powerful platform if you're familiar with pattern cutting maybe doing a manual process this tutorial or set of tutorials will show you how to transfer your knowledge of pattern cutting from manual pattern cutting on pen and paper to the digital platform which is Adobe Illustrator and how to basically edit our patterns so if you are not familiar with pattern lab pattern lab essentially is a software that generates bespoke basic blocks and sewing patterns using your unique measurements and then outputs them either as a multi-page PDF for home printing or sharing or it outputs it as an e pattern which is a fully editable SVG file which allows you to then customize your pattern into hundreds of different designs so yeah all of our tutorials using those patterns or basic blocks are done using Adobe Illustrator okay so I would really recommend there are other platforms out there that do edit SVG's or patterns and they are it's you can use coral draw or Inkscape as well however we default Adobe Illustrator kiss in my personal opinion it is the most powerful platform out there and it's very simple to use and once you get the hang of it your it'll be very easy to do pattern cutting in Adobe Illustrator and I'm going to show you all the tips tricks tools that you need when it comes to do this so this tutorial the first one is obviously all about basically downloading buying Adobe Illustrator it's about 19 pounds a month on a rolling contract just for the single package you can obviously get other ones you can get the whole suite if you like for a little bit more it's completely up to you but you also have a free trial so maybe download that seven-day see how you go with it use this tutorial to learn so this tutorial is all about essentially opening up Illustrator creating a workspace a pattern cutting workspace let's say so I go to all the various different tools you need to do pattern cutting okay so instead of me explaining it when I just get on and actually get on with it and do it so as I said by double illustrator it should download to your desktop before we have this little C panel or this Creative Cloud which will eventually you'll get from from Adobe and then from in here in the app section you will have all the different programs that you have either bought and then you can also install upgrade you can open them etc so when you have a double you illustrate to CC 2019 which is the most recent version on your computer let's simply open it up okay so here's Nobby illustrator spacing an introduction to Adobe Illustrator and how we might use it as a pattern cutting platform take a little bit of time to load okay let's just get rid of that sort layer here it's because I'm running some screen capture software okay so first of all it's going to go create new okay and let's just doesn't matter what we do at the moment the modes gonna set up our workspace let's just go a four centimeters that's fine click create and here we have Adobe Illustrator now what I've done is I've already set this worse workspace up for Adobe for pattern cutting as you can see we have a few tools on the left-hand side here and a few tools on the right most likely though what you will get when you open this up you'll have essentials classic which is a little bit and this'll obviously this will be out as well which is quite intimidating so Adobe Illustrator can look very very intimidating what with all the different bits and pieces on here so what we're going to do in this tutorial is basically just refine it a little bit to give you a bit more just make it simpler so we don't need all these tools for pattern kartum you only need just a very few and so we're just going to have those on these toolbars here so we can obviously then very easy quickly just relate those tools and use them for pattern cutting so I want to do is I'm going to first of all I'm gonna remove all of these ones and to do that I'm simply gonna go to this little blue this little edit toolbar button down here click that as you can see we have all the different tools that we can add or remove down the side here but it's something that we're going to go to click on this button just here and we're going to go to a new toolbar and its gonna name it let's say I don't know pattern cutting and cutting left yeah that we on this side click OK and as you can see here you get this little - a little plus icon once again click on this little menu item down the bottom here and now this gives us a list of things that we can add to this toolbar and I'm going to tell you which ones you need to pick out when it comes to pattern cutting ok so first of all we need these two selection tools and when they come to this later in different tutorials what these actually do so just click and drag yeah it's click and drag on there same as direct selection tool we'll take that one as well just place it next to it try not to place it on top otherwise they'll they will be contained in one area so just to the left or underneath well then going to scroll down and we're gonna go for the pen tool and once again just place that to the left we're then going to go to the add Anchor Point tool delete Anchor Point tool and also an anchor point tool we didn't add that one hang on a minute there we go in fact let's make this there we go to make it long and thin and that way we can add easily also we're gonna add the line segment tool and also the rectangle tool and what next just roll down we're gonna go for the type tool when it comes to changing the information our blocks later we're also going to go for the rotate tool very important for pattern cutting else we're gonna go for the eyedropper tool really important when it comes to picking up attributes of lines and also want the scissor tool really important it comes to cutting your pattern piece up into various bits and pieces and I believe that's everything let's have a let's just check yeah that should be it for now that should be perfect okay great so this is our new toolbar and we can just click on that to simply move it out there's one last thing I've forgotten let's just click on this to edit toolbar again and then down the bottom here you see how you have this show and this is essentially this okay so we're gonna need this is our fill and our line color and we also want to show the coloring controls as well okay so just make sure these two are selected and this is your new menu okay which is a lot cleaner there's less tools than we had before and we'll do is going to swap these over so I'm gonna click on going to drag that bar out I'm gonna hit delete and it's going to drag this over to the left hand side there we go next we're going to sort out this column here okay we've got a lot of tools here that we just don't need so to make things easier we're just going to basically drag all of these out and we can just delete them as we go let's just get rid of everything on this sidebar here you only have to do this once in the future we can save this workspace so every single time we leave a pattern cutting and OB illustrator you just plot this workspace and all it'll be done for you so this might be a little bit time-consuming but it'll be great for the future let's just close all these great okay so we have no more right sidebar which is fantastic so what we're gonna do is we're going to go to window and then I'm going to select from this list here which let's say toolbars or let's which tools actually need on this right-hand column here so first of all we want to have where is it we want brushes that's an important one so she's click and drag that into the side column click that closed its go window let's go where is it so we have brushes we also have where as it's strokes important one so she's bad stroke also we want to have the Pathfinder there we go what else do we need we need stroke Pathfinder vgu we need a line as well we need the line tool place it in the side bar and there's one more which I always forget which is let's go to my other workspace ah document info of course ok I always forget this one ok ok so and we also want document info so let's go to window and then document info here we go let's place that in there as well perfect so this is your new pattern cutting let's say area this is perfect these all the tools that we need to do pattern cutting there's nothing else we're not going to get confused with anything so next what we know is we're going to save this workspace so I'm going to go to window and I'm gonna go workspace and then what is it new workspace and I'm going to call this pattern cutting tutorial you can name it whatever you like click OK now what happens is if you go back to window and workspace you'll see that it is now pattern cutting tutorial if we go to anything like painting for example you'll see that it's a different set of tools so this way we've saved our workspace so we can always access it at any point ok makes it nice and simple ok so now we've set up our let's say our workspace for pattern cutting next what we'll do is look at some navigational skills ok which is really important so essentially on your keyboard if you hold down the command key for a Mac or ctrl key for a PC sit down the command and hit plus on your keyboard you see that you can zoom in let's just build an element so you can see what we can actually zoom in in to so on hit ctrl + + you can zoom in and it goes in so far so details how zoomed in by okay and control - to zoom out so using ctrl + to zoom in and control - to zoom out we can essentially isolate parts of our pattern okay imagine that this is our pattern also if you hold down the space key for a space key on your keyboard click and then click on your mouse and drag you get a little hand and this allows you to drag around the page when I click you can drag when I release it let's go see so we can drag around the page and these combination and you'll get the hang of these eventually you can move around your pattern and zoom in and isolate areas very very easily so this is really handy when it comes to navigating around our pattern okay so next what we have is we're gonna look at rulers okay so with our patterns we give you the option to to use either centimeters or inches when it comes to drafting your blocks or taking your measurements now obviously if we're going to start pattern cutting the the basic blocks that you've created and they were set up in inches we want our our workspace to be in inches or centimeters okay it's really simple to do this but you'll have to do it every single time you bring your you bring your pattern into Adobe Illustrator so it's really important to get the hang of this so first of all we're gonna go to view and then click rulers show rulers okay and that will bring up our guides on the left and also on the top here if I right click so if I hover over this this little dark bar the ruler and right click you can see it gives me some options you have inches millimeters centimeters and some various web formats and type formats so I always use centimeters because I'm working I'm in the UK it's my system but you can also change that to inches there you go so inches or centimeters so every time you open up your basic block in Adobe Illustrator unfortunately the rulers don't save to workspace you just have to make sure you have your rulers set to inches or centimeters depending on what you're working with also you'll need to go to illustrator or I think it's Preferences basically I think you can find this in the file menu for Windows and for Macs it's in the illustrator CC - go to preferences and then units you can also let's just cancel that get to it from this little button here okay so click preferences and go to units and you just want to make absolutely sure that they isn't on something else like the pixels just make sure it's on centimeters so if you're working with centimeters make sure it's centimeters in the rulers and also in the Preferences okay once you're happy click OK great stuff so we've done a bit of navigation we've done a little bit of setting up the workspace and also talking about you know how you might basically yeah go to set up your your station before pattern cutting ok so that's the first connector toriel just a bit of an introduction next we're going to start looking at how we get our basic block or re pattern or baton which is an SVG format into Adobe Illustrator and onto something called the cutting table the cutting table is something that we've produced and I'll explain that in the next tutorial