A reader asked me if I could explain to him how to create the Bavarian flag in Illustrator. Instead of explaining this with text and images I decided to capture another screencast tutorial instead.
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As usually there are probably other ways of doing this. I’m only showing one way. It basically comes down to these simple steps:
- Draw 2 squares: 1 black and 1 white
- Turn them into a Symbol
- Apply Transform effect to repeat them horizontally
- Apply Transform effect to repeat the line of squares vertically
- Expand everything and move squares to make 1 prefect rectangle
- Skew and resize the checkerboard (to match the Bavarian flag)
- Download the video tutorial from Xtreak (1130 x 860 pixels)
- Download the video tutorial from Vimeo (1130 x 860 pixels)
How to create a skewed checkerboard pattern in Illustrator from Veerle Pieters on Vimeo.
Maybe turning the squares into a Symbol (step 2) might not be needed if you’re expanding the squares again, but I thought I show this anyway. If you don’t expand the the Symbols and you only expand the Transform effect you can change the color of the squares in one instance by changing the color of the symbol. However, if you decide to expand all the Symbol’s instances, all squares become editable and so you can give each one of them a different color.