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Essential Tools for Pattern Making

Now I wanna talk about groups and isolation mode. So again, this is some artwork that I have previously made. I brought in just to show you some examples but don't let the artwork overwhelm you. Tomorrow, all day long, we're gonna making artwork. You'll know exactly how I did all this but I just needed something to show you, some examples of some more tools that we'll be using. So we already covered groups a little bit, but these two, these two documents really look the same but they are constructed very differently. So I wanna discuss a little bit how important it is to group certain objects as you work and how to keep them on the Layers panel and really establish a proper workflow to how you illustrate. So this document on the right, I have nothing grouped, okay? So all these little bits are independent of each other. These are independent, these are independent. That makes it incredibly difficult to say I wanted to rotate this bird a little bit. I showed you the Lasso tool earlier, ...

but if I come in here and do it on this guy, it's also gonna select a handful of background images, the cloud and one of the droplets or whatever, so I would say that this document is constructed very poorly. Over here, I have the birds already grouped together. I have the droplets grouped together, I have the clouds grouped together but they're also in a clipping mask, which is what we're gonna talk about soon. And then the background color is there. So I'm gonna delete this mess so we don't have to mess with it at all. And come over here and talk about groups and isolation mode a little bit. So these are all grouped together. It's great if you wanna move all of them, but what if I only wanna move one of them? So if you double-click on a group, it's gonna bring you into isolation mode. So this has locked everything in the background so I cannot select the droplets or the cloud. All I have available to me is what was in the original group. Within this group, I have been grouped the individual birds, okay? So it's kind of a group within a group. So when we work tomorrow and building patterns and illustrations, we'll do this naturally. We will group a bird and then we'll make a lot of birds and we'll group them all together. Or it may not be birds, but whatever we're working on. So these are all grouped independently of each other. So that's great if I wanna say just rotate this guy a little bit. What if I wanted to come in a step further and just rotate one of these little bits here? I can double-click again. That brings me into a step deeper isolation mode. Then I can come in and start moving this guy around a little bit, rotating him ever so slightly and really perfecting my work, okay? So to get out of there, there's a couple of different ways. You can all, all the time, you can double-click anywhere in your document and it will take you, I'll just do it, it'll take you back to the beginning. So everything's grouped there. If I double-click, that's isolation mode. If I double-click again, that's one more step into isolation mode. You can also know this by this diagram up here. We have our layer, group and group. And so this back arrow, like say you might sometimes be five layers deep into isolation mode, if that makes sense, you have a group within a group within a group, you don't wanna get all the way back out, you just wanna get to your last group. So you can use back arrow and that'll just take you to the last isolation mode that you were in, which was all the birds. Then if I click the back arrow one more time, it'll take me to the original document. Did I explain that well? Okay. So that in a nutshell is group and isolation mode. The other nice thing about this document is that the clouds are in a clipping mask. So I'll show you how to create a clipping mask in just a second, but if you want to, the nice thing about this is the clouds aren't overlapping the edges, which will be okay if they did but it just kind of reduces the distraction for me right now. But they're still available for me to edit. So if I double-click on anything that's in a clipping mask, I then have the ability to move them all around. Their grouped right now so if I double-click again, then that will take me in, I think I grouped them twice. That will take me into where I can just edit one at a time. And by now, this is really hard to see because they're like beige. Make them black just for the time being so you can totally see how you can move those around, even though they're within a clipping mask. So I'm gonna take those back into the beige color. And the way to exit a clipping mask is to double-click outside of it, and then everything pops right back into the clipping mask. Yes? So when you were setting this up, did you have to go in and create in sequence this layer groups, this layer groups? Or did it default as you were doing it and building and making things work? I just go with the flow and do it as I go. So this is only one bird, it's the same bird that's repeated over and over again. So I created one bird and grouped it and then copied those around. Same thing, the clouds are different but I created all of them and then I grouped them. So when you're actually working, it will make sense to you when you need to group items. And as long as you don't have lots of little tiny things like this, it's usually pretty easy to go back if you realize later that you need to regroup some things, if you need to go back and do that. So I'm gonna show you how I made a clipping mask for these clouds by making a clipping mask for these birds, okay? So I'm just gonna draw a rectangle. Keyboard shortcut for the rectangle tool is M. And because I have my Smart Guides on, I can just draw a square that's the same exact size as the square of my background here, and it automatically is on top. So if I want to place these birds in a clipping mask, then all I have to do is select, they're already grouped together. If they weren't, then I would select each one individually. And the square that's on top, so the image that you want to use as a clipping mask, always has to be on top. And the keyboard shortcut for clipping mask is Command + 7. So now I have my birds on a clipping mask and I could probably do that one more time for the droplets. And that way, we would just be working with a single square. So the neat thing about this is that I haven't lost any of my design elements. Like if I need to move this bird in, it's not like the wing doesn't exist. It's there, it's just in a clipping mask. So I would just make sure I got the right one, just double-click on it, double-click on this guy again and start moving him around. Again, rotate using the Rotate tool. And then when I double-click, then the clipping mask automatically holds its integrity. So go back and forth and edit a bit? Absolutely, yeah. Using clipping mask is just a nice way to keep your lines clean if they are distracting. And there's lots of other ways to use them too that we'll keep using, but you can use clipping masks on photos, you can clip using any shape, and we'll be doing more and more of that as we go. When you did the clipping mask, that basically cleaned up your edges to size? You did the rectangle and then? Keyboard shortcut? Mm-hmm Let me just show you. I'll just do it one more time here. Okay, so I have the rectangle and then I have that selected. And to select anything that's pouring over here, I'll just hold the Shift key to select more than one thing. So I'll select the droplets and Command + creates a clipping mask. And then you can move that clipping mask around. And you can also always, if you're not happy with the clipping mask, you can release it, delete it and forget it. So to do that, you right-click, say Release Clipping Mask and then that way you still have this box in here that you don't need anymore so I just always drag it out and delete it so that it's not just a box with no fill (mumbles). Yeah. We had a question that just came in about copying images. I know that you mentioned that you had one bird that you copied many times, and Des wants to know, when copying an image multiple times, how do you change the color of an individual item? Well, I think I know what she wants to know. So let's see. If I have this bird, I'm just gonna open up a new document so we get a fresh start. So Command + N for a new document. I'm gonna leave everything the way it is. Hit OK and paste this guy by hitting Command + V. So if you wanna duplicate this, I'm gonna hide my edges by hitting Command + H so you can see what I'm doing. I'm just gonna drag them around and hit Option to duplicate. Then I can rotate this and then I just change its color on the fly by hitting one of the colors in my color palette. So that's how you do it. And you can change it as many times as you want and copying your own artwork is a great way to save time. (chuckles) Okay, I'll just use the same document to introduce to you the align tools. If say you needed this guy to be replicated and in line, I'm just gonna make copies by holding down the Option key. If say you needed all these in line, Illustrator makes it really easy. So you just select everything on your artboard or everything that you want to align and we have the Align tool right over here on the right. So you can align these objects or distribute the objects. I pretty much exclusively use the align objects, but one thing you should know that is available is under the flyout menu, go ahead and select show options and you can choose whether to align these objects to the selection itself or to the artboard itself. And I toggle between these two options on a day-to-day basis depending on the work that I'm doing. So if I want to align these to the artboard, I'll hit artboard and then if you want horizontal alignment, it'll align them all horizontally. If I align them all vertically as well, they'll be right on top of each other. So now I have a bunch on top of each other. This is great for when you're doing things like lines on a page for a stationary. We're gonna be building some portfolio pages so this is gonna can come in handy when we do that. If say these are over here, if say I have align to selection checked, then it's just going to align them to the center of everything that I have selected. So not necessarily to my artboard but to the center of everything I have selected. You can also run through these. You can align everything to the far left of your art, well, this needs to be to my artboard. The far left of the artboard, the far right of the artboard, top and bottom. So the Align tools will really make your life a lot easier when you're working with illustrations. And we'll be using them a lot over the next few days as well. Okay, so a couple of other options that we're gonna use a lot, I'm just gonna grab my doily over here, is they're available to you in a couple of different areas but I'm just gonna show you what I do all the time and I just right-click to get to them, and that is transform and arrange. So the Transform tool will let you move this object across the page. I'll show you that. You can also get reflect, scale and rotate from this menu here too. so if I wanna move this guy, let's say 100 pixels to the right and 50 pixels down, then this is where you come and put in 100 by 50. I wanna introduce this to you because this is essential for patternmaking. For making repeating patterns, you have to move your artwork around by very specific increments. And so this is how we're gonna do that, and this is how you can move things around by an exact amount. If I grab my butterfly over here, and I already introduced this to you a little bit but the Arrange Panel tool is like if I have the butterfly body here selected, I can right click and go to Arrange, and this is where you can bring them to the front, bring them for or just forward by one step at a time, send them backward by one step at a time or send totally to the back. So I can send them totally to the back and then the wings kind of overlap on top. The other way to do that is by hitting Command, left and right brackets. So if you have something selected and you wanna bring it to the front, you can. I think I probably have. Yeah, I have a lot on this artboard but he just started popping up so I'm hitting Command + right bracket and he's one by one slowly coming to the top. So he's on top now. So if you're working with a small amount of objects, the Command + left and right brackets will be beneficial to arranging your objects. I also want to talk about the Layers panel. So you can work, some people love to work with layers, some people don't really care to work with layers. I do both, it depends on the project that I'm working on. But if you're familiar with Photoshop, you're probably familiar with layers. It's the same deal here. So I am going to copy this butterfly by hitting Command + C and getting him into a new document. Command + N and Enter will give you a new document. Command + V gives you a new butterfly. So I just want to maybe this is grouped, that's grouped. I'm gonna ungrouped these things that I have grouped. So everything's ungrouped. And I'm gonna select these most back wings and group them together by hitting Command + G. And so that'll bring those up upfront. But I'm gonna put them on like a very bottom layer so then all the other layers I can work with on top of them. So to create a new layer, you come to your Layers panel and select Create New Layer. Now Layer 2 or any new layer is automatically gonna be on top. I'm gonna drag and drop it to the bottom. If you come over to the butterfly on the layer that you're on, this little arrow will give you a drop-down menu of all the little bits and pieces that you have in the document. So this arrow shows you what you have currently selected, and it's the group, it's the only one that says group and it's the only thing that I've grouped on the document. So I can click this circle right here to select it. I am going to right-click and arrange them, send them to the back so that I can easily find them over here. So now he's on the very bottom of the first layer. And I can drag and drop it onto the second layer. So that's on the bottom. I'll close the top layer, and now I can lock this layer. So all you have to do is click on the second box right there and the key lock comes up. So now I cannot select those background wings, which makes it a lot easier to work on the elements on top of it. The other thing I can do is hide that layer. So if I'm distracted by whatever is on this particular layer, you can just hide it altogether. You can also just hide one thing at a time by coming in to the drop-down menu of your layer and just hiding one thing at a time. Okay, and then you can lock one thing at a time. So I don't often use this tremendously, though I do use it from time to time and it's really nice when you're working with something that has a background and you keep trying to work on it and you're moving the background. It's really nice to lock your background in place so that it's still there but you're not dragging it all over the place while trying to work on the elements on top. So you can create as many layers as you want. You double-click on the layer to name it and say I wanted to create one more layer for like the body. I would come in here and group those together, create a new layer. And this time, I want it to be on top and I'll drag-and-drop it up there. So then I can lock, say I can lock the wings and the body and then just start working on that, okay? The next tool I wanna show you is the Trim tool, and this butterfly is the perfect thing to show it with you. I don't have my color palette set up on this new document, so what I'm gonna do is just get these existing colors over there. So to do that, I'm just gonna select the whole butterfly, hit New Color Group and I won't name it this time, just hit OK. So now I have all these colors available to me in the color palette now. So I wanna come in and kind of add some, some artwork like kind of on top of his wings. So to do that, I'm gonna grab the Blob Brush tool which is Shift + B. And I think I wanna use this brown color. So what I'm gonna show you is gonna make this easy. It's gonna be really hard to get exactly up to the edge of this butterfly wing if I wanna design elements around off the edge of it. So say I wanna do something like this. And I will make this one shape by using the Shape Builder tool. But ideally, I would have it stop right at the edge. You can use a clipping mask, and I'll show you how to do that. Gonna ungroup that. I'm gonna grab just this one wing and use it as my clipping mask. So I'm gonna make a copy of it by hitting Command + C. I'm gonna paste it in front by hitting Command + F, okay? Now there are two of these there, you couldn't tell, but there are two. And to bring it all the way to the front, you can right-click, Arrange and say Bring to Front. And sometimes, I'm working in layers, this is why there's sometimes a downside to working in layers. So to get out of my layers, I'm gonna group this altogether, which brings them all into the top layer and ungroup them, just because that's gonna be easier for what we're doing. So we're all in one layer now. So that way, I can bring this one to the front and he is on top of everything, not just on top of the things in his layer but on top of everything. So to make a clipping mask, I just select these two objects and hit Command + 7, and that has pretty much accomplished what I wanted. It gets the brown like exactly to the edge, and it's still available to me to edit, like if I need to move it around a little bit, which is nice, but when you're sure that you're sure that you're done, it can make for kind of a busy document to have tons of clipping masks all over the place. So that is when the Trim tool comes into place. So to use the Trim tool, it's over here on the pathfinder and you will go through the steps just like I did by making a clipping mask. But after you have done making the clipping mask and you're happy with the end result, you can just hit trim and it will trim everything away and you're left with just this bit. So it's an independent shape now, but it perfectly fits the segment that you wanted it in. I don't know about you but when I learned that, I was really excited. So I'm gonna do, I'm gonna use that same technique to add some, I don't wanna do that, same technique to add some, little doodads on top of this wing right here. I'm gonna grab the Blob Brush tool and I think I'll do white. I'll need to deselect that. I'm gonna grab kind of this cream color and just kind of start adding maybe like one shape that kind of goes over it. And I'm gonna totally build this out here. I don't know, have you ever seen a butterfly with this? (distant indistinct muttering) Just yesterday. It's like a corset. (audience chuckling) It's gonna work, you know, whatever. It's a boardwash cheek. That's right. That's the point, is that this is fun. Okay, so to do that, like, this is a mess, it would be really hard to get in there and just identically match the line of this little segment. So what I'm gonna do is select it, make a copy by hitting Command + C, pasting it in front by Command + F. That's also available to you up here under Edit, Paste in Front, okay? Or you can just simply paste by Command + V because I'm bringing it to the front anyways. So there are two there, right-click and bring it to the front. And I'm just gonna select both of those and hit Command + 7 to make a clipping mask, okay? Like I said, this pretty much accomplishes what I wanted, but even when I scroll over it, you can see all those messy edges. And if this was a big document with lots of illustrations, this is just gonna get in your way if you're sure that you're happy. So select the clipping mask and choose Trim, and we have one brand-new shape, okay? So of course he looks a little lopsided so I'm gonna replicate those on the other side. I think I can do that. I'll get close anyways. To do that, I'll hit O for reflect. And I need like a center point here. I'm gonna try this and just bring it over here. That's pretty close. I didn't do, if you remember I didn't replicate this exactly on the other side using the shift key because I wanted some, I wanted some freedom there so this didn't work exactly right but if I was doing this at home, I would just delete these, just delete the whole left side and, hey, I'll just do that. I'm here, why don't I (mumbles) (indistinct chattering) I'm running the show, I can do it. So if it's not exact, just delete it and all you got to do is hit O to reflect this and then reflect it somewhere around the middle and bring it over here. Hit the Option key to duplicate it and send it to the back. Now you have two perfect sides. Any questions about any of that? We had a question come in, this is kind of getting back on the color palette, the bringing it out by getting it printed. So this one comes from Elizabeth and they say if you have created a palette from a photo and then you realize that you need to work with spoon flower colors or the Pantone colors for the purposes of printing that, how do you match the colors that you have used from your photo to create your design with the colors that the company actually has access to? Is this something that's irrelevant? Do they just create the color somehow with the ones that they already have? I guess they're just asking how does one know if it's possible to print the exact color on the fabric? So I can speak to the Pantones. I can guess at how you do it with Spoonflower, but we are definitely gonna bring that up with Stephen in Session three, Segment Four. But my guess is that you will purchase this color map that Spoonflower has available and bring it home and eyeball match it to what you're working with. We'll get in more with that with Stephen because he's the pro. Because with my Pantone colors, a lot of times I will work off a photograph and those are not Pantones automatically, they are CMYK or RGB or whatever. And so maybe somebody knows better ways than this but I bring my book out and I sit and get in some really great sunlight and I colormatch by eyeball, what is the closest one and then load them in that way. So you can definitely still do it. Do you have to buy a new Pantone book every year or how does that work? No, no. So I have my Pantone book now. No you don't. Pantone comes out with a new color every year. However, somebody may correct me on this, I don't believe it's a new color. I believe it is the color that already exists that is of the year, okay? So it has already existed in here. Now every once in a while, they will release new colors and you can do one of two things. You can buy a new book or you can buy just the new releases, which is an incremental cost to the whole thing. So they don't come out with brand new colors all that often. I think they did just a couple years ago but when that happens you can just purchase them as they come out if you even need them. You don't necessarily need them. It depends on what you're doing. If you want them, you can get them. So I haven't looked at this in a while but I think this runs around 300? And this is the most affordable way to go. This is for fashion and home. They also make them for paper. They make them for a bunch of different industries so make sure to get the one that you need for your industry. And make sure that what you're doing requires this. You don't have to have this to design. Sometimes it just depends on your set up. Sometimes companies will do this for you, translate them to Pantones for you. Sometimes a printer won't even use it, like Spoonflower doesn't use Pantone because they don't want to require everybody to use Spoonflower to have this because it's not the most, an average person really doesn't need this so they didn't wanna require people to buy it. But they also make big books with chips in it. They make big books that have actual cotton swatches in it, but this is kind of the bottom line. Isn't there's something on there that has the RGB recipe on it so that you can take those numbers and drop them into the color panel there? If so, that would be new to me. They make a book called the Bridge. Yes, that's it. Yes, the Bridge does that. So yeah, they're not on here. What is the Bridge? It has the Pantone printed colors, the swatches and then the closest approximation in CMYK. So you type that in over there? Those percentages over on the side? So there's an option you can just type in? Yeah. That was kind of my question earlier but I didn't know how to say it, and they said it. Yeah, yeah, that was perfect, that was very good. So when I am working, I will have most likely drawn picture of colors from a photograph, and I will just bring my book out. And sometimes I'll print them. Usually I'll just work right on the computer because I also have all these swatches floated in my swatches panel because that has come with the purchase of this. You have to purchase this to get the swatches in your panel. And then you just go through and start picking out what you want. Occasionally I'll flip through here and fall so in love with the color that I begin here and then build out a whole color palette around one color that I found in here that I am determined to use or whatever. So anyways, this is just colors upon colors upon colors, and these are these are printed on paper of course but this is the closest match that they can get for this for fabric. One of the questions that comes up in other classes is, because Pantone is available in coated, non-coated and all these different versions, what works best for what we're doing? Or is it just, you're close enough, it's okay? Yeah, I wanna say that but coated and uncoated is specific to the print industry. So on paper. And your specific company and mill and printer will be able to tell you whether they want you to use coated and uncoated. For home and fashion, it's not coated or uncoated, it's just one thing. So it just depends on your specific application. But I believe coated is like glossy, and uncoated is not glossy and it just depends on the final application for it. Whoever you're working with though should tell you which one is ideal. All right, we're all good. Okay, we are going to, let's see. Okay, I just wanna reiterate something I quickly breezed over earlier, is about the Join tool, the Join command? And to do that, I'm just gonna draw like a heart. We're drawing hearts. So I'm gonna grab the Pen tool. Command is P for that. And I'm just gonna come in and drop the first anchor point for the bottom of the top of the heart. So I'm gonna come here and I'm just gonna eyeball this guy, that, and then this is gonna curve right down to something like that. If you aren't really happy with this, I can never be happy with a heart. I feel like there's so many ways. Come over to the Pencil tool and grab the Smooth tool and then come in here and just start kind of playing with your edges here a little bit. Pencil first then click on smooth? Yes, so the pencil has a flyout menu and most of these do. If they have a little triangle in the bottom right-hand corner, they have a flyout menu, which means there is more goodness behind there. So just click, hold and hold as you drag out to get those options. So the Smooth tool is right there. So I think we're good with that. With it selected, I'm just gonna replicate it to the other side because it would be really hard to do that with the Pen tool. So O for the Reflect tool and I'm gonna drop my reflection around any of these center points, either the top or the bottom, and bring it over here, holding the Shift key to make it exact, and Option key to duplicate it. So then, it's two shapes. We've already learned how we can make it one shape by a couple of different ways, but one great way is to come in here with the Join command and with your direct selection arrow, the white arrow tool, just marquee over the two points that you wanna join and hit Command + J to join those. So now you can't really tell but it's one shape. So I can't move it independently of each other. So that is great. So now, like I think the top is a little too deep so with the white arrow tool I can come in and move it up a little bit. And then play with all these handles to make it a little better. So the command tool, the Join command is what you'll use to join two anchor points together, and it often unifies shapes that you're working with, okay? I next want to show you, let's see, some fun transformations that we can do to stuff. So I'm just gonna draw a circle. Perfect circle by holding the Shift key down arrow. And I don't know why we're working with brown color. Let's change it to like green maybe? I'm gonna hit Command + H to hide my edges just so you can see what we're gonna do. But under the Effect menu up here, we have a ton of options available to us. So all these you can play with, just gonna show you a couple that I use most often. So the distort and transform can give you some, let's see. If we roughen it, (mumbles) go ahead and hit preview so you can see what we're doing. I have corner selected so I'll turn it into a square. If I smooth this out and just start doing this, it'll just kind of roughen it up some. And you can play with the detail and the size of how rough it gets. This is a secret to making, giving your work a little more of a hand-drawn feel when you're not starting from hand-drawn sketches. You do a perfect circle but you don't want it to be perfect. Sometimes you want it to be perfect, sometimes you don't. So roughening it up a little bit will make it a little more hand-drawn looking, easier on the eye. So if I hit OK, bring back my edges, you can see though that this is an effect and so it hasn't, we, I don't know how to explain that, like it still has the perfect circle back there and so it's still editable in some way but I don't need to edit it and I, if you have a bunch of transformations in a document, it can slow your document down. So I like to go ahead and expand this and let it be what it is. So after you do a transformation like that, you should come up to objects and expand the appearance. And now it's expanded and it is what it is. It is what it is. I'm gonna start with another circle. Oops, that's a square. L gives you the ellipse tool, so I'm gonna start with another circle and come back up here and show you a couple of other things. Distort and transform, okay. Pucker and bloat can give you some fun thing. I'll hit Preview and you just start kind of dragging this around to get some new shapes. And you can create just lots of fun things. One way puckers, one way bloats, (giggles) and same deal with this is that once you hit OK, it's still got this like transform, it's still the circle but I go ahead and always expand everything I do. So now it's expanded and it is what it is. The Simplify tool, let's see what the best way to show this is. We're gonna use this tomorrow when we scan in our sketches. We were talking about that earlier a little bit on how to reduce the number of anchor points we have in something. So I wanna show you maybe, I'm just gonna show you with what I have up here. So this will work. I'm gonna make them. Yeah, that number of anchor points is fine, but I'm gonna show you how to even and reduce it from there. Sometimes when you're working with a project or you've scanned something in, it's gonna have like thousands of anchor points, thousands of thousands of anchor points and you don't really need those. And what it's gonna do is slog your document down. So to do that, you are going to come to Object, Path and Simplify. That will bring up the Simplify dialog box. And you will be able to see... If you hit Preview, you'll be able to see how many points there were originally and how many points there are now. So I'm gonna show you this again because we only had 21. But really, when this is helpful is when you have over 1,000. And you can see, you can get down to just a couple hundred and it won't even change the look of your artwork. So I'm gonna take the curve precision back up pretty far. And I've reduced the number of anchor points by, what is that, like seven? And it looks pretty much the same. You can see the original over here on the left. It looks pretty much the same and it's reduced the number of anchor points I have, which just gives me a cleaner illustration and a quicker working document. (distant indistinct muttering) Yeah, and we'll just be using that more and more in the next few days. There are a couple of other ways to kind of roughen something up. So if I have a perfect circle, you can come over here to, I always have to find this one. It's the warp. It's under the Width tool and it's the second one. The keyboard shortcut is Shift + R and it's the Warp tool. And so if I have a perfect circle and I just don't want it to be so perfect, I can start dragging this in a little bit and do you see, it just kind of makes it not so perfect. And so we'll make that, it kind of tugs in whichever direction that you're moving. So if I use that on the butterfly, I just have to select it and then I can play with kind of warping his wing a little bit too. These are just kind of minor adjustments, but they make the illustrations look a little more hand-drawn. Another thing that I may be doing during this course is hiding my artboards. And I just wanna show that to you. Your document at home, I have white on white because I feel like it just gives me kind of fresh space to work in. But most of the time, beside your artboards is gonna be gray or dark gray and if that gets distracting and you just want white space to work with, you can hide your artboards. And that is under Object. No, I'm just gonna find it this way so I can tell you for sure. It's under View, okay. Sorry about that. It's under View and you can select hide your artboards and that takes your artboard edges away. Artboards are incredibly important if you're working on a print document. They're not important when you're just illustrating. It doesn't even matter what size you're doing. You can be illustrating small or big because all you do is enlarge it and it doesn't lose its integrity. So if you just want white space, hide your artboards, you get them back the same way you took them away. Show Artboards right there.