Beautiful patterns can be easily created by duplicating basic shapes with a simple colour scheme. This tutorial explains the process of creating a trendy chevron background pattern using Illustrator‘s vector shape tools. We’ll then take the design over to Photoshop to add some extra polish and really bring the pattern to life with subtle gradients and texture effects.
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Here’s the final abstract geometric background pattern we’ll be creating. It’s made up of a simple tessellating shape which alternates through a warm colour scheme and is given some texturing treatment in Photoshop to bring it to life with subtle detail. This kind of abstract pattern design can look fantastic when applied as a background to all kinds of digital and print work.
The first step when creating a design with a limited colour scheme is to draw up a series of swatches to form a palette. Here I’ve picked out a cool mix of hues named We are young from ColourLovers. Draw a series of squares in Illustrator and use the Eyedropper tool to Shift-Click and take a sample of each colour from a screenshot.
Excellent tutorial Chris! The dodge and burn steps make such a difference. Thank you for that.
That was so awesome!! Thank you so much!! Your tutorials are the BEST! I always look forward to them!
Awesome Chris!Your tutorial always ‘weird’ way of doing it…keep it up..
Thanks.
Thank u so much Chris! <3
Loved it, i always learn a lot from your tuts
Brilliant graphic!
The extra work in Photoshop really adds that extra bit of detail.
Awesome.
Always love the abstract pattern tutorials.
Wonderful tutorial! I always learn when I come to this blog, thanks for sharing!
Great graphic! The tutorial is so detailed, thanks for sharing!
Nice one! Thanks for this. I could write a novel on what I learned along the way, primarily because a lot of other little challenges cropped up and I had to consult the wonderful people on the internet to figure out stuff.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/simiansays/9876999614/
With an FB banner for multi-purposing purposes ;-)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/simiansays/9868300476/
abstract is always interesting..hope abstract art is as easy as creating abstract display backgrounds :P
I just discovered how useful adobe illustrator can be, so im going to save this for later. Thanks for the tutorial :)
Hi Chris! Love your end result of this tutorial.
I’m a bit of a beginner and I’m stuck on the step in Photoshop – “Set the value of the foreground colour to one of the design’s swatches using Photoshop’s Color Picker.”
How do I do this?
Thanks. :)
Oops no I’ve figured it out but now I’m having trouble with the burn and dodge tools. Nothing seems to be happening when I use them, any tips? :)
Beautiful work and very detailed instruction, thank you Chris :)
I like this. :) I’m gonna try to replicate my own version without reading :D
Thanks so much for this tutorial. I got stuck a couple of time, but worked it out. lol. But don’t take that as criticism, this project is only my 2nd attempt at using Illustrator! Total noob!!
Thanks again x