10 Adobe Illustrator CC Pattern tips - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class | Helen Bradley | Skillshare

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10 Adobe Illustrator CC Pattern tips - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

teacher avatar Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Intro to 10 Pattern tips for Adobe Illustrator

      0:44

    • 2.

      Before we begin

      0:54

    • 3.

      Tip 1 - Scale a pattern using dialogs

      2:31

    • 4.

      Tip 2 - Scale etc with the Tilde key

      1:39

    • 5.

      Tip 3 - Pick apart a pattern

      1:41

    • 6.

      Tip 4 - Make a pattern from anything

      1:02

    • 7.

      Tip 5 - Edit a Pattern

      2:45

    • 8.

      Tip 6 - Make a pattern by hand from a Symbol

      3:52

    • 9.

      Tip 7 - Save your Patterns

      2:31

    • 10.

      Tip 8 - Warp a pattern filled object

      1:52

    • 11.

      Tip 9 - The Global nature of Patterns

      2:33

    • 12.

      Tip 10 - Recolor patterns with Recolor Arwork

      2:03

    • 13.

      Bonus tip - Placement of a pattern

      2:11

    • 14.

      Bonus tip - Add a background to a pattern

      4:34

    • 15.

      Project and Wrapup for 10 Illustrator Pattern Tips

      1:12

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About This Class

Graphic Design for Lunch™ is a series of short video courses you can study in bite size pieces such as at lunchtime. In this course you'll learn 10 must know Adobe Illustrator tips for working with patterns. These tips include creating global patterns, editing patterns, recoloring patterns, and more. This is an update of an earlier Skillshare class - I've added a couple of bonus tips and I've fully updated the class to use the most recent version of Illustrator. 

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Meet Your Teacher

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Helen Bradley

Graphic Design for Lunch™

Top Teacher

Helen teaches the popular Graphic Design for Lunch(TM) courses which focus on teaching Adobe(R) Photoshop(R), Adobe(R) Illustrator(R), Procreate(R), and other graphic design and photo editing applications. Each course is short enough to take over a lunch break and is packed with useful and fun techniques. Class projects reinforce what is taught so they too can be easily completed over a lunch hour or two.

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Transcripts

1. Intro to 10 Pattern tips for Adobe Illustrator: Hello and welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch Class 10, Pattern Tips for Adobe Illustrator. My name is Helen Bradley, and I'm a Skillshare top teacher. I have over 260 courses here on Skillshare, and over 150,000 student enrollments. In this class, I'll show you 10 must-know tips for creating and working with patterns in Adobe Illustrator, including a bonus tip covering a foolproof method for adding a background to any pattern, one of the things I get asked about most often by my students. By the time you've completed this course, you will have enhanced your knowledge of working with patterns in Adobe Illustrator and you'll have tools and techniques that you can use every day. Without further ado, let's get started. 2. Before we begin: Before we begin, there are a few things that I'm going to assume that you already know about patterns in Adobe Illustrator. One of them is that you can fill a shape with a pattern by simply creating a shape, target the fill, and then just click on a pattern to fill it with. There are a number of patterns that are shaped with Illustrator. Some of them will appear in your swatches panel. Additional patterns can be found by clicking on the swatch libraries menu option here and go to patterns. When you select patterns, you get access to patterns such as basic graphics, which are dots, lines, and textures, some decorative patterns including vonster patterns, and some decorative legacy patterns and nature patterns. Let's just go to animal skins. There are a number of animal skin patterns including a zebra pattern here. I'm assuming that you know this much about using patterns in Illustrator. From here, we're ready to go ahead with our tips. 3. Tip 1 - Scale a pattern using dialogs: Our first step involves scaling, rotating, and moving a pattern using the dialogs. I have a rectangle here that's filled with our pattern. To scale it, I'm going to choose "Object" and then "Transform" and go to "Scale". What's important here is that you disable Transform Objects because you don't want to change the size of this rectangle. But you do want to have Transform Patterns selected because you want to change the size of the pattern. Make sure that Preview is turned on. It is the most recent versions of Illustrator, it wasn't in earlier versions. Now to uniformly scale a pattern, you can just type in a value here. I'm going to scale it to 50 percent. The pattern size is significantly reduced. You can also use a non-uniform scaling which allow you to squeeze things up in one direction or another. I'm going to set this to 30 percent horizontal and 50 percent vertical. You'll see it's not particularly attractive for this pattern. It may work better for other patterns. Using the same set of dialogs, you can also rotate a pattern. Choose "Object", "Transform", and then "Rotate". Same things apply here. Make sure Transform Objects is disabled, Transform Patterns is enabled, and Preview is enabled so that you can see what you're doing. I'm going to click here in the angle and just press the up arrow key. That will increase the angle by one degree at a time. Shift up arrow does it by 10 degrees. Then you could also just type a value in here. When you're done, just click "Okay", and the pattern will be angled as requested. I'm just going to undo that. You can also move a pattern using a dialog, and that's quite handy when you want to adjust how the pattern looks inside a shape. Again with the shapes selected, choose Object, "Transform", and then "Move". Same thing here, disable Transform Objects, enable Transform Patterns. Make sure Preview is checked. Now sometimes you'll find that it actually has some position values in here, so it's best to just zero these out. Zero at horizontal, vertical, distance, and angle. Now you can just go ahead and move the pattern. Now I want to move this so that this umbrella comes a bit more into the document. I'm going to increase the horizontal value. I can do that by holding the Shift key as I tap in this horizontal value dialog, and it's increased by 10 points at a time. Pressing just one down arrow or up arrow at a time takes at one point in either direction. You can do the same with the vertical setting here. When you're done, just click "Okay". 4. Tip 2 - Scale etc with the Tilde key: In addition to using the dialogues to scale, rotate, and move a pattern, you can also use the tilde key. You'll find it in the top left-hand corner of most keyboards. With this shape selected, I'm going to hold down the tilde key, and now I'm going to the Selection Tool and just select and drag this shape. Now the shape isn't actually moving, although it looks right now as if it is, but it's in fact the pattern inside the shape that will move. When I let go of the left mouse button, you'll see that the shape goes back to where it was but the pattern is moved in its position inside that shape. You may find this tool helpful. You may find that the dialogues themselves are a little bit easier to use. But the toolkit also works with a couple of other options, and one is this Rotate option. We're going to click on the Rotate Tool, and again, hold the tilde key, and as I do that, I'm able to rotate the pattern inside the shape. Now this is probably one use of the tilde key that's a little bit easier to manipulate so you may want to use it with that particular option of rotating the pattern inside the shape. You can also scale a pattern. I'm going here to the Scale Tool, make sure to select it, hold the tilde key down, and now by just dragging inside this shape, I can scale a pattern bigger or smaller. If I add the Shift key, then the pattern is going to be scaled pretty much in proportion. Again, this can be a little bit hit or miss, so I just offer it to you as an option. Just make sure to select the appropriate tool, the Selection Tool, the Rotate Tool or the Scale Tool, hold down the tilde key, and then manipulate the pattern within your shape. 5. Tip 3 - Pick apart a pattern: For our next tip, we're going to pick apart a pattern so we can understand a little bit about how patterns are created. I have a pattern here that is shipped with Illustrator. Now, I'm going to just drag and drop it out of the Swatches panel. I'm also going to resize it because it's pretty small right now. I'm holding the Shift key so that it resizes in proportion. If we have a look in the last palette, we can learn a little bit about this pattern. If we open up the layer and the group that's holding the pattern, we can see that the pattern is made up of various elements. This is quite a complex pattern, which is why I chose to show it to you. There are a lot of elements that go to make this particular pattern swatch. But at the bottom of this group and at the bottom of every single group that contains a pattern, you're going to find what's called a no fill, no stroke rectangle. I'm just going to change the color of this layer so that we can see it a little bit more clearly. Let's choose magenta as our color. Here is the no fill, no stroke rectangle. You can see it over here, no fill, no stroke. It always appears at the very bottom of any pattern that you create and it marks out what is the actual pattern swatch. Although we've got lots of elements here in this dialog, lots of elements saved with this pattern swatch, the bits that are actually doing the lifting work, the bits that are the actual pattern pieces are inside this no fill, no strike rectangle. The existence of this no fill, no stroke rectangle and the implications of it marking out the area that controls our pattern can be really important, and we're going to see that in this class. 6. Tip 4 - Make a pattern from anything: It's possible to turn pretty much anything into a pattern in Adobe Illustrator. I'm going to make a pattern from a star. I'll go over here to the rectangle tool. Select the Star Tool which appears underneath it. Click once in the document. I'm going to make sure I have a five-pointed star and click "OK". Let's fill the star with a color. I'm going to double-click on the existing fill, which is white, and let's go and get a yellow color for our star. I'm going to remove the stroke from it. Here I have a star shape. I can make that into a pattern by just dragging and dropping it into the swatches palette. If you have color groups in your swatches palette, just make sure that you don't try and drop the star into those because the color groups can only contain colors, but the area at the very top of the palette can contain anything. I'm going to delete my star. I'm going to make a new shape, in this case, I'll make it a rectangle and we'll fill it with our pattern by simply clicking on the pattern. Now you'll see the star pattern that we just created. 7. Tip 5 - Edit a Pattern: It's possible to edit a pattern. Our star pattern, although we created it by just dragging and dropping a star into the swatches panel, can be edited by just double-clicking on it and it will open automatically inside the pattern options dialogue that was new in Illustrator CS6, and obviously it's available in all versions of Illustrator CC. Now, we can edit this pattern. One of the things that we can do with it is to spread these out because these stars are very close together. We're able to see the tile right now because I have Show Tile Edge selected, that's a handy setting to have. What I'm going to do is make this pattern tile much larger. I'm going to make sure that this is unlocked, this setting. I'm going to just change these values. Right now, this is 95 points wide, so I'm going to increase it by nearly doubling it. I think I'll set this to about 180. Then I'll set this value to 182. What that does is it makes the spacing between the stars inside the pattern a lot more attractive. You could also change the placement of the star. For example, so we've got a simple grid here but we could use something like brick by row and with a half offset, we get this very attractive pattern. I'll click Done. Now I'll create a shape and it's filled automatically with the star pattern that we just created. It's a potentially more attractive version of the original star pattern just created by editing the basic pattern. Now I've just wound back that document to our original star pattern. In addition to double-clicking on the star pattern to edit it, you can also just drag and drop it into the work area. If we have a look at the last palette, I'm just going to choose Window and Layers here, we'll see at the very bottom of this group is going to be a no fill, no stroke rectangle. It's there at the base of every single pattern. Now if I hold the Shift and the Alt key, that would be Shift option on the Mac, I can scale the size of this, no fill, no stroke rectangle. When I do, I'm going to enlarge the pattern. It's still going to be a simple grid pattern, but it's still able to be edited and used this way. I'm going to drag and drop this pattern into the swatches dialogue, then I'll delete the original. I'll make a rectangle. Let's fill it with this second pattern. This was the original and this is the hand edited version, not done using the pattern options dialogue, but edited by hand, by simply, in this case, adjusting the size of the no fill, no stroke rectangle that marked out the bounds of the pattern. 8. Tip 6 - Make a pattern by hand from a Symbol: It's possible to make a pattern in Adobe Illustrator from anything including symbols. You can also make a pattern by hand. I'm going to show you how to do that right now. I'm going to create a rectangle. I'm going to create a rectangle of a fixed size. I'm going to make mine 500 pixels by 500 pixels. A nice even value. I'm going to remove the fill from this so right now it only has a stroke. I'm going to use some symbols so I'm going to the Symbols palette and I'll click here on the library drop-down list and go to Heirloom. I'm going to use a couple of symbols here. I'm just dragging them into the document. I'll select over each of them in turn and use the Shift key to enlarge them. One of these is going in the very middle of my documents. I'm just looking for the intersection with the middle of the document there. This one is going up over the very top corner of this shape. It's really important that you look out for that little indicator that says you've intersected it at the correct position. I'm going to Alt drag, holding the Shift key to move this over to the next corner. Then I'll select both the shapes. Click on one "Shift", click on the other, and Alt drag them down to the bottom. If I add the Shift key as I travel down, they're going to be moved in a perfectly vertical direction. Again, I'm looking for that intersect indicator. I'll let go the left mouse button. We know that every pattern has to have a no fill, no stroke rectangle at the very bottom so we're going to remove the fill and the stroke from our rectangle. This rectangle is now going to mark out where our pattern is. You can see that inside the corners are all the four pieces that we need to make up a whole jewel. I'm going to select everything, and drag and drop it into the swatches panel. If I put it up here at the top, then it becomes a pattern. Now, I'm going to move it out of the way because I know that this is not going to work. Let's see why it's not working and this is a fault of most recent versions of Illustrator. I'm going to click on the Rectangle tool. I'm going to drag out a rectangle, target its fill, and we're going to fill it with our new pattern. I'm just going to scale it down so that you can see what the problem is. The problem is that the no fill, no stroke rectangle that we created sometimes isn't created as a no fill, no stroke rectangle. It looks like it is, but it isn't. I'm just going to fix up this problem. Let's go across here and let's highlight our no fill, no stroke rectangle. You can see here, no fill, no stroke. The problem is it's not correct and this has been an issue since I think about Illustrator CC 2018. To fix it, we're going to the Appearance panel. You can get to that by choosing Window and then Appearance. You're going to go to the Flyout menu here. You'll see that we've got selected here, New Art Has Basic Appearance. What we want to do is get rid of everything. I'm going to click here on "Clear Appearance." Now this is a no fill, no stroke rectangle. Let's go and select our pattern and drag and drop it up into the swatches panel. Let's go back to our shape and click on our new pattern. In this case, our new pattern is working perfectly. We've learned two things here. We've learned that we can create a pattern from anything, in this case symbols and in the process, the symbols are actually disconnected from the symbols library. They're just Illustrator vector shapes. But also that there's a problem and some people will experience this with no fill, no stroke rectangles in the most recent versions of Illustrator. You now know how to fix that problem. 9. Tip 7 - Save your Patterns: When you're making your own patterns, it's really important to note that patterns are not saved in Illustrator. If I create a brand new document, you'll see that the Swatches panel is our default Swatches panel and the pattern that I just created a few minutes ago, the one with the jewels in it doesn't appear inside the Swatches panel. If you want to be able to use patterns that you've created, you're going to have to do something about that. This is how you do it. The first thing you want to do is clean up your Swatches panel, so get rid of absolutely anything that you don't want to save with this particular file. You have to keep this icon here, this non, and you have to keep registration but anything else can go. I know that these patterns are not needed. I also know that the first of these patterns is the one that I created that was wrong so I don't want that I want to keep this one. I'm going to drag and drop this pattern, the wrong one onto the trash can. The only thing that's left in my Swatches panel right now, is this pattern that I want to save and two things that I just can't remove anyway. Now I'm going to save it, I'll go to the flyout menu and I'll choose save Swatch Library as AI. You've got two options here an ISA file can't contain a pattern, so there's no point in choosing that you want to save it as an AI file. It's going to be placed where Illustrator expects your patterns to be found so I'm going to call this Jewels. It's an AI file, I'll just click Save. Now in any document in future, I can get access to that pattern. I'm actually going to close this file and I'm just going to trash it. We'll go back to this new document I created just a couple of seconds ago and let's go and now find our jewels pattern. We can do that from the flyout menu using open Swatch Library and user-defined, or we can find it here at the bottom of the Swatch panel. Here in libraries so I'm going to "Click" here user-defined and then we'll go to jewels. Here is a file and all it's got in it is my jewels pattern so I can just click it and that will add it to the current Swatches panel then I can create a shape that is filled with my jewels pattern. You will need to save your patterns to be able to use them in future in other files. 10. Tip 8 - Warp a pattern filled object: It's possible in Illustrator to warp a pattern inside an object. We're going to start with a rectangle. Right now, it doesn't matter what size it is. I'm going to remove the stroke from the rectangle. I'm going to fill it with this fairly complex pattern that is shipped with Illustrator. I'm going to select over this rectangle and we're going to warp this using the envelope options. We'll start by choosing Object and then Envelope Distort, and we're going to Envelope Options first of all, because it's important to make sure that you can actually warp the pattern. In this case, it's already set to do this. I've got Distort Pattern Fills selected. It's really important to have that enabled, so we'll click "OK." Now we'll select our warp option. I'm going to choose Object and then Envelope Distort. You could make it with a warp, which is a built-in shape. You could make it with a top object where you try and fill the pattern to the shape of another object. But typically, the one you'll most likely want to use is Make with Mesh, so I'll click to select that. I now get an option for setting up my mesh. I'm going to select a simple four-column by four-row mesh. You could make yours more or less complex than this. You'll see the grid over the shape that has our pattern in it. I'm going to the Direct Selection Tool and I'm going to click on this anchor point here. Now I can pull it to adjust the pattern within this shape. You need to be really careful to make sure that you're actually selecting the mesh point and that things are working. Wind back using Control or Command+Z if things aren't working as expected. But you can now bend and manipulate the pattern to suit. You'll see that the shape itself isn't warping but the pattern is. 11. Tip 9 - The Global nature of Patterns: Let's look now at the concept that patterns inside Adobe Illustrator are global. Before we do that, now, let's look at global colors because if you've not met global options before, then this might all be a bit confusing for you. I have two shapes here that are colored in this pink up here and you'll see that the pink looks a little bit different in the swatches panel because the yellow has a little triangle across its bottom corner telling you it's a global color. This pink is not a global color. The result of that is without these two shapes being selected, if I change this color pink to some other color, nothing is going to happen to anything that's colored with that color inside the document, they're not linked. But that's not the case with this yellow, because yellow is a global color. Even if I don't have this shape selected, if I change this color, then the shapes are going to change color. You can see that happening here. That's the concept of a global color. If you change the color, even though the objects that are filled with that color aren't selected, everything is going to change. Patterns are global too. I've got two shapes here that are filled with this pattern up here. This is at 100 percent size, this is at 50 percent size. Without having either of these shapes selected, I'm going to edit this pattern by double-clicking on it and I'm going to remove one of these clouds. If I click "Done", you'll see that the pattern inside this shape is updated because it's a global change. This pattern is in use inside these two objects and even though the objects weren't selected when we made the edit, the objects themselves, the patterns inside them have been changed. If you don't want this behavior to occur, this is what you're going to do. Let's double-click this pattern again to edit it. I'm again going to take out a cloud. Now there are no clouds in this pattern. But instead of clicking "Done" this time, I'm going to click "Save a Copy." Now this pattern is a separate pattern and it's not linked to those previous shapes. Provided I click here on "Cancel", I have my new pattern and I've got my old pattern and because these shapes were created with the old pattern, they're not changed. To change them, we would need to select on the shape and then apply this new pattern to them. Just be aware when you're working with patterns inside documents in Adobe Illustrator. If you edit a pattern that's in use elsewhere in the document, then every instance of that pattern inside that document is going to change unless you specifically save it as a copy and break that connection. 12. Tip 10 - Recolor patterns with Recolor Arwork: It's possible to take a pattern in Adobe Illustrator and to completely recolor it, at the same time, create a brand new pattern. I've got a shape here that's filled with this pattern, so I'm going to select my shape. Up here on the toolbar is the Recolor Artwork tool. I'll click it to get access to the Recolor Artwork tool. In the most recent versions of Illustrator, you're going to have to click now "Advanced Options", and that gives you this dialogue. These are all the colors that are in the document, and you could change any one of them by just double-clicking on this option here and change that color. Let's change this one to a pink. Everywhere that color is in use in the pattern, it's changed this pink color. It's also possible to use the Edit option. We'll click here on "Edit", and here, we get access to the colors inside the document if we lock them as they're locked here. When I hover over it, it says unlink, which tells you that right now they're linked. These colors are all linked together, so I can drag on any one of these colors and rotate the colors through the color space. The relationship between these colors is maintained. If you see a color combination that you like, you can just click "Okay". When you do, notice up here that you get a brand new pattern. We've still got the original pattern, but we've got a recolored version of it. At any stage, you can come back to either of these versions of the pattern. Go back to the Recolor Artwork tool, click on "Advanced Options", go back to any of these options that you want to use, I'm using Edit, and then just change the color of your design. Now, I like this, but I don't like these yellow and green areas of the image, so I'm rotating the colors around to get the bits that I do like, then I'm going to unlink the colors. Now, I can come in and change these. Now, I have a color combination I like, I'll click "Okay". We've now got three patterns; the original, the first iteration of it, and now the second. 13. Bonus tip - Placement of a pattern: This next tip is a little bit more informational than being a tip itself and it involves the placement of pattern inside a shape. I'm going to click on the rectangle tool and drag out a rectangle. I'll fill it with one of my patterns. I'm going to add a circle over the top of this. I'm going to the ellipse tool. I'm going to hold down the Shift key as I drag out an ellipse. It's going to be filled with the same pattern and you might notice something really interesting that's happening here, and that is that the pattern is in the exact same place inside the circle as it would've been if it had been inside this rectangle in this position, so these are forming a sort of seamless look. In fact, if I remove the stroke from this shape, you'll see that the edge of this circle is seamless. That begs the question, what exactly is happening here? I'm just going to delete that shape. I'm going to drag this pattern out of the pattern dialogue. What's happening here is, this is the pattern swatch, and if I were to take this and place it up in the very, very top corner of this document and let go, you'll see that it is again forming part of this seamless pattern. The reason for this is that this top portion of the pattern is at 00 and when it's placed inside an object, it's assumed that the pattern is going in at 00, and so this is going to be offset. If we wanted a pattern piece to look like this in the corner, what we could do is just go and create our rectangle in the very top corner of the document. When I create it in the top corner of the document and just make sure that I'm refreshing it, let's just add a fresh version of the pattern to it, see how the top corner of this shape now looks like the top corner of the pattern swatch. Patterns are being placed inside objects with a reference to the top corner of the document, so you can move the pattern inside the object, we've already seen how to do that, but this is the reason why you see what you see when you're adding a pattern to a shape, how the position of the pattern inside the object relates to the top corner of the document. 14. Bonus tip - Add a background to a pattern: Our final tip involves adding a background to a pattern. This isn't as easy as it might first seem. I have a foolproof method that's going to work with every single pattern. Let's have a look at the problem and the solution. This is the pattern we're working with. It's a pattern of weather objects. I'm going to double-click on the pattern to get access to the pattern itself. The size of the pattern is 500 by 500, so it's a nice easy area to cover with a rectangle. I'm going to the rectangle tool, I'm going to click here. I'm going to make a shape that has 500 pixels by 500 pixels in size. Now, I'm going to fill it with a color. I'm just removing the color first up. We're going to add a color, and let's just change that color so it's a color that doesn't appear elsewhere in the document. I'm going to take this rectangle and put it behind everything with object arrange and send to back. Now, I'm going to pick it up, and I've got my tile edges visible here. I'm just going to move it into position over the tile edge. Now, it's just about in position here, but you'll be able to see the problem really clearly. The problem is that this shape is cut off here, and this shape is cut off here. This shapes cutoff here, and it's cut off here. If we change the overlap, then we're going to end up with different things being cut off because things are overlapping on all sides of the document. If I click here to get this piece back, then we're missing this piece. There's no combination of these overlaps that's going to give you all the pieces of your pattern visible at the one time. Effectively, this process is not working, and it can't work. It's impossible to work within the pattern options dialogue. Let me just delete my filled rectangle. If we get to the end of the process of actually creating the look of our pattern, and at this point, we want to add a background to it. This is how it's going to work in every single instance. I'm going to drag the pattern out of the patterns dialogue into the document here. I'm going to the last pallet, and I'm going to locate that no fill, no stroke rectangle that is at the very bottom of this pattern because we know already that this marks out where our pattern swatch begins and ends. What I'm going to do is I'm going to make a duplicate of it. I'm just going to drag it onto this plus sign here, so now I have two. I have this no fill, no stroke rectangle and this no fill, no stroke rectangle. Well, we know that the one at the bottom has to stay no fill, no stroke or else the pattern is going to fall apart, but this one doesn't have to stay. It's the exact right size for a background. What I'm going to do is target this next to bottom one, and I'm going to fill it with that color. Now, if I grab everything using the selection tool, drag over absolutely everything and drag and drop it into the swatches panel, I now have a pattern, I'm just going to delete it here. I now have a pattern that has a background in it. Let's just drag out a shape, and fill it with our pattern. This is the original pattern, and this is the one now which has the fill behind it, and none of these shapes inside this pattern are cut off, and it's also recolorable. If I go to the Recolor Artwork tool and click on Advanced Options, I can change it now. I've got a color to work with, so I could unlock these colors. I could take this blue background color around and say, "Okay. Well, this is the color that I want to use as my pattern background," and click "Okay", and then we get another pattern. We get a pattern automatically created. This pattern has a background. This is a full proof method that will work with every single pattern you create in Illustrator. It's a little bit tricky, but you know the basics of what goes to make a pattern. You know that you've got your no fill, no stroke rectangle at the very bottom of that pattern, and you can duplicate it, fill one copy of it, the topmost copy of it with your pattern background color, and then just save your pattern. From there, you can just recolor it as you like. Selecting your pattern filled object, click on the Recolor Artwork tool, click Advanced Options, and then edit. Then if necessary, unlinking the harmony colors so that you can get access to your background color to change it to whatever color that you want. When you're done, click "Okay". Another iteration of the pattern is created inside these swatches panel. 15. Project and Wrapup for 10 Illustrator Pattern Tips: We've now finished with the video content for this course, so it's over to you. Your project for this class will be to tell me which of these pattern, tips, or techniques you think are going to be most helpful to you in your everyday work in Adobe Illustrator. Post a comment to this effect in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this course and that you've learned things about working with patterns in Illustrator that you were previously unaware of. If you did enjoy this course and when you see a prompt asking if you'd recommend this class to others, please would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes, that you do recommend the class, and secondly, write, even in just a few words, why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now, if you see the Follow link on the screen, click it to follow me and you'll be alerted when new courses are released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of graphic design for lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming class soon.