Have you seen all the cool vector illustration that’s being enhanced with texture? Have you always hankered to create these in Adobe Illustrator? Did you attempt, but struggled to make it work? Texture can be a really simple way of adding additional interest to your design, whether it be an illustration or a pattern. One of the simplest ways of adding texture to your surface pattern designs is by using vectorized patterns you create from scratch. This new course, Textural Repeating Background Pattern in Illustrator, focuses on the creation of the textures with the end goal being the use of these in other repeating patterns, though they can be used for any application. Creating layered surface pattern designs can give you that edge to make you really stand out in the crowd. As a designer, knowing how to create both raster and vector (Photoshop and Illustrator) textural patterns is a real asset. This course focuses on vector (for raster-based, check out my other course, Textural Floral Pattern Design which focuses on raster or bitmap textures created in Photoshop).

In this class, I will show you how texture adds interest and a tactile quality to what might otherwise be a flat color. We will begin some of the work for a few of the patterns in Photoshop. This sets up preparation of the images to be converted to vectors in Illustrator. Alternately, we will create some from scratch, right in Illustrator. We will work with full color textures and one color textures, as well as creation of dot patterns and more.

Once we have created a few textures, we will apply them to existing patterns to see what we can come up with. We will then experiment with color and will even dive into use of the Recolour Tool to experiment with our newly created patterns. Your head will be spinning like mine was by the end of the class. Take this one hour class for a full mind work-out! There is no exercise better, especially if you have been stuck! 

You may have taken courses on pattern design before, but it is guaranteed that there are new measures and methods to be learned every day. If you've taken other Deloresart classes, this is just a natural progression in your development towards full proficiency in all manner of design work.

As far as prerequisite skills, I would recommend some knowledge of Photoshop and Illustrator with the goal of wanting to learn additional techniques. In class, we’ll talk about both the 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 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. Remember, you can adjust speed of the playback in particularly difficult areas.