Add a Background to a Pattern in Adobe Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Adding Backgrounds to Patterns in Illustrator - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design For Lunch Class. Add a background to a pattern in Adobe Illustrator. Graphic design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. In this course, I'll show you a range of solutions for adding backgrounds to your patterns in Illustrator. Now, adding a background to a pattern can be done in a number of ways and there are advantages and disadvantages to each. One method doesn't even work on some patterns. Are you confused? Don't worry. By the end of this short course, you will know your options for adding backgrounds and how to determine whether a method will work or not. It wouldn't be an Illustrator for Lunch course if you didn't learn some handy tips and tricks and things that you probably didn't already know that will expand your knowledge of Illustrator. Enough for me if you're ready, let's get started looking at adding backgrounds to patterns in Illustrator. 2. Pt 1 Add a Background Color as a Separate Object: In this course, we're going to look at four different ways of adding backgrounds to your patterns in Illustrator, and they have different uses. So what I have here, is a document that is scrapbook paper size. It's 12 inches by 12 inches. We're going to use this as an example all the way through. I'm actually going to give you this file, because it contains the patterns that perfectly illustrate what we're trying to do. So if I were creating scrapbook paper, the first thing I'm going to do is add a rectangle that is the size of this document and put my pattern in it. So the document size in pixels is 864 pixels in height and width, that's 12 by 12 inches. I'm just going to align this to the art board so I've got aligned to art board selected here. I'm just going to center it up on the art board. If you don't see your align options there, you can obviously also go to Window, and then align, and get the panel out. So I'm going to fill this particular document with my most complex pattern. You will see later why that is the most complex pattern. The one that is going to be the most trouble when we go to add a background in a different way. I'm just going to scale this a little bit and I think the patterns are a little bit big, so let's just drop it down to about 75 percent. I'm not going to transform the object obviously, I'm just going to transform the pattern. Let's take it down a bit further still. So let's just click "Okay". So this is our pattern fill document. Ignore the white line through this, that's a totally different topic, that's a fracture line in the pattern that's Illustrator, just being particularly unhelpful. Now, when you're selling something like scrapbook paper, this pattern here is obviously transparent. If we wanted to add a color background behind it, the simplest method in this particular instance, is simply to add a rectangle behind this pattern-filled rectangle, that has our background color in it. So I'm just going to click away from the document right now. I'm going to select a color to use. It doesn't matter what color it is. I'm going to add another rectangle. So I'll just click on "The Rectangle Tool", click on "The Document", the exact same dimensions are going to come up. I'll click "Okay" and we get our rectangle filled with our color. I'm again, going to center it on the art board, and I'm going to move it behind everything with object arrange, and then send to back. Now, the color is all wrong, but that's just fine, because we still have our colored rectangles selected. So if you don't know what color you want to use for your background, do this and then go and click on the "Recolor Artwork Tool". Go into Edit, and now, you can experiment with different colors. So you can work out exactly what color you want your background to be. Now, I'm going to go for a purple color, so I'll click "Okay". So there is a nice scrapbook paper with a background. Now, this is going to be exported as a JPEG file, so it's going to be flattened. It doesn't matter that the pattern is in one rectangle and the background is in the other rectangle, that's just perfect. Now, of course, if you already knew what color you wanted to use as a background for this pattern, what you would do is select that color before you go and create the rectangle. So you just go and select the color you want to use, and then go and create your rectangle that's filled with that color, and then just move it behind the pattern filled rectangle. But the Recolor Artwork Tool would allow you to experiment with colors if you're not sure what color you want to use. This process will be able to be used for preparing documents for sites like Redbubble. On Redbubble, you actually create a fixed size document, and then you fill it with your pattern, and you export it and upload it to Redbubble. It's also going to be appropriate for scrapbook paper. We know scrapbook paper is going to be 12 by 12 inches, for example, and so we'll create a document 12 by 12, fill it with a pattern, ship it out. So it's going to work very well for that use. Where it's not going to work is for sites like spoonflower, because spoonflower, you upload the pattern swatch, not an object that's filled with the pattern. It's also not going to work for stock sites and for selling creative assets, because if you're selling a pattern, you probably want the background to be embedded inside the pattern swatch, and so that's a different situation entirely. It's not going to work for that. We're going to look in a later video at how you would deal with that situation. 3. Pt 2 Add the Background color to a pattern filled object: In the last video, we added the background to the pattern filled object as a separate rectangle. Now it's also possible to add the background through this rectangle up here. What I'm going to do is just remove that rectangle. I'm going to select this rectangle which has a transparent pattern in it. I'm going to the appearance panel, here's the patterns panel over here. You'll get to yours potentially by choosing window and then appearance if you don't see it in the bar along the side of the document. Now, it's possible to add another field to this rectangle. We'll go down here and click "add new fill". What happens is that a new fill is added to the panel here and it's at the top. Now this operates in the stacking order. This one on the top, the stroke comes underneath but it doesn't have a stroke, so that's just fine, and this fill is at the back, or what we want to do is to change this fill here. I'm just going to click on it and I want to choose a color, but I don't have any colors here to use. Let's just go and solve that problem. Let's just click away from this document. I'll double-click on this pattern swatch because I wanted to be able to select a fill color. I'll choose a fill color and click "okay", and then we're going to add it to the swatches panel here. Once it's in the swatches panel, we can use it in our pattern. Let's go back to the appearance panel. We're going to go back and make sure that our rectangle is selected and go to the fill here and then click on the color that we want to use for the pattern background. Now just as we did before, we can also recolor this if we want to go to the recolor artwork tool. Now there are a lot of colors here in use, but if we go to the edit options, we can isolate the color we want to use. Make sure that link how many colors is got aligned through, so that they are not linked. This is our background color and so we can just drag it around to adjusted and choose whatever color that we want to use. Now there is a small gotcha with this particular process and I just want to show it to you. If we wanted to resize our pattern and make it smaller or larger right now, note that I've got this fill selected here. When I go to object transform scale and try to re-scale this object, you'll see that the pattern is not rescaling. I've got transform objects turn off, that's exactly as it should be. I've got transformed pattern selected. I've just reduced it to 20 percent. I'm clicking "okay" and nothing is happening. Now that is unusual behavior. If you've got an object selected and you want to change the size of the pattern in it. The problem is that in the appearance panel, this fill is selected and not this fill. You want to make sure that you've got path select through, If you've disabled the selection on this fill and at least have this fill selected before you go and do that transform objects. It just might be to if you have everything organized and you think you've got exactly what you want happening and you want to just resize your pattern, and all of a sudden, the scale option doesn't work. When it's not working. It's probably because you don't have the right fill selected in their parents panel. Just be aware that, that might cause you issues. This method of bearing the background inside the patent filled object allows you to deliver a very simple document to somebody. I probably wouldn't use it a lot, but it is worth knowing, and it's certainly worth knowing the different behavior of the appearance panel when you go to make transformations dependent on what you actually have selected in the appearance panel, and that it is possible to have things selected in the appearance panel and have illustrated behave differently because of that selection. 4. Pt 3 Embed the Pattern inside the Swatch Method 1: Let's look now at our options in terms of putting the background color inside the actual patterns swatch. I've got some patterns swatches here that we're going to look at. So we're going to start with this particular one. I'll just double click on it to open it inside the pattern make tool. Now we can read over here the size of this pattern tile. I've got the tile visible so you can click to show it or hide it here. It's important that you have at showing right now because you need to know exactly where this is. My pattern is 160 pixels by 160 pixels, which means that I need an object that's 160 by 160 filled with my background color to put inside my pattern. So I'll go to the rectangle tool, I'll click once in the document, and I'm going to type 160 and 160 as the size of my rectangle. Now it's filling with the pattern itself, but that's fine, I can just double-click on it and I can go and choose a color to use. Now this is going to appear over the top of the pattern object itself, so we need to put it behind, so we'll choose object arrange, and then send to back. Now we need to place it in position because you can see right now that it's cutting off the pattern. So we need to go and get our rectangle and we need to move it. So I'm going to the selection tool, and I'm just going to move it exactly into position. Now you will want to Zoom in and make sure that you've got it perfectly right. You shouldn't be seeing any white lines at this stage and that's vital because if you're off by a pixel, it's really going to show. Now I'm Zooming in so I can make sure that I'm clear and everything's looking just fine. So I'll just click "Done." Now we'll go and test it. My Documents, 864 by 864, now my rectangle is filled with the last pattern that I created so we now have a pattern swatch that actually got the color built into it. Now there isn't advantage to this because we can start working with the pattern and create different iterations of it. I've got this rectangle selected, I'm going through the recolor artwork tool. We've got two colors in our document. We've got the pink of the dot and the purple background. Let's go to edit. I can go and experiment with different background colors at this point. So I'm going to use actually a yellow. If I like that design, I'll just click, "Okay," but when I do have a look up here. What happens is that we get another pattern, a brand new pattern in illustrated that is these colors, so we've still got our original and now we've got a different color. This allows us to build up a whole collection of different colored patterns using this technique if we can embed the background inside the patterns swatch itself, then we can create color wise very, very quickly and very, very easily. Now, work for that dot pattern. Let's go and sit on a pattern where it's not going to work. This is my umbrella pattern. Now there are a couple of problems with this. One is that the width and height are not whole numbers. So to make a rectangle is going to be difficult. Note that I couldn't take these values and create them as a rectangle but illustrator will use a lot more values after the decimal point then it will actually show. So we can't be sure that this is 371.6447, it might be 371.6447123, and so creating a rectangle of that size when we don't actually know what the numbers after the decimal point are can be difficult. So what we would want to do at this stage is just round this off. So I'm going to make this 372. I'm going to make this 480. Now that will throw a pattern of slightly. In this case, it's not affecting the pattern at all, but you would need to double check that, that doesn't affect some of the spacing on your pattern. It's a very, very small amount, but be warned that you just have changed the size of your pattern tile. The next thing to do is to obviously go and create a rectangle that is this size. So I'm going to click once in the document and a rectangle needs to be 480 by 372. Obviously, I'm going to fill it with a solid color, let's go and get a dark color, I'm going to move it behind object arrange, center back. Now, I'm just going to drag it over the top of the pattern tile, and we embed have trouble getting it into the exact position. If you do, you may want to turn off this align art to pixel grid because that can cause problems. But that's the least of our problems. There problems are way worse than just not being able to align this perfectly. The problem here is that things are getting cut off. You can say that the top of this umbrella is cut off and the side of this one is cut off. Now, you may think that these overlaps will help you. Well, let's change this one and let's change this one. Well, it solves part of the problem, but not all of the problem. You can see now we've got this one locked off here and here, and we're missing the bottom of the umbrella here and here. Now, I designed this pattern in such a way that it would be very clear to you that this is not going to work. There's no combination of these options here that is going to solve it for us. So basically with this type of pattern, we cannot achieve the result that we're looking for. So let's just go to the last pattern. I'm just going to open this up and get rid of the background because I wanted to show you why it's not functioning. The reason why it's not functioning is that this object here is over this edge and this bottom edge, and this object here is over the top edge and the side edge. So we've got content over every single edge of this pattern tile and so there's no combination of overlaps that's going to allow us to get a background in behind here. So it's just not going to work. Any time that you've got content that is over three sides or more of your tile, it's not going to work. But let's just have a look at one where I do have content over the edge of the tile, but it slightly differently rearranged. This is a pattern tile, you can say the tile edge here, but in this case there's content over the top here and here, there's content over the right-hand edge here and here, but none of this content overlaps the bottom or the left-hand edge. So in this case, we could put a rectangle behind it. We are going to want to change the width here though, because again, it's a fractional amounts. So I'm going to make that 668. It's going to change the pattern very slightly, not enough for us to worry about this no visible change that we would be able to easily say. Let's go and create our rectangle. This one's going to be 668 by 640. Add a color, I'm going to move it behind, I'm going to position it in position. Now we've got a problem with the overlap here, but if we click here, we're going to solve it. So if I turn off the tile edge, and if I turn off the art board just so that we can see what's going on here, and move away and Zoom back out, because of the way that this particular pattern was designed so that elements only overlapped two edges, the top and the right-hand edge, they have to be adjacent edges, so you couldn't have them overlapping left and right because that's going to cause an overlap problem here. But if they only overlap one of the horizontal edges and one of the vertical edges, then you are able to embed the background inside the pattern. If it overlaps more than you can't do it. So this pattern can actually carry its background with it. So I'm going to click "Done." Again, like the other pattern that's able to be recolored. Let me just show my Art board again so we can see what we're doing. Let's go and make a rectangle the size of the document, and let's go to the recolor Artwork tool. We can isolate the background color here in the edit options, must make sure that this is unlinked, I think this is the color, and so now we can create whatever background color we want for the pattern very, very easily when I click "Okay." You can say that the pattern is added to the pattern swatches. So we've got the original pattern with its purple background and now we've got a version with a different color background. This is the simplest method for adding a background color inside the actual pattern swatch, but it does come with the proviso that you can only have content over two sides of the pattern tile or nor any side of the pattern tile for it to work. In the instance of our umbrella pattern, we still have problems. So the solution to that is going to be in the next video. 5. Pt 4 Embed the Background inside the Swatch Method 2: In the last video, we added a background to this pattern and we were successful in doing so but we weren't able to add a background to this pattern here because of the overlaps. Let's just get rid of this rectangle and let's go and see what we are going to do. We already know that we can edit a pattern by double-clicking on it in the swatches panel, but that's not going to help us because things aren't going to work for this particular pattern. But I do have it open for a reason. I find that we get slightly better results with our pattern when we're working with round numbers, and the dimensions of this pattern tile are fractional. Before I exit this, I'm actually going to fix this pattern so that the pattern dimensions are a round number. I'm making mine 480 by 370. I don't have to actually know that value because I'm not going to use it. Well, I'm going to use it but I don't need to remember it. But I am going to round it off because I think it's a better option to do that. Having done that, let's just click Done. The pattern is now edited, but only insofar as the size of the pattern tile. We can't put a background on it the way that we're used to. We need a different method. For this, I'm just going to drag the pattern out of the swatches panel into the document. Now, every pattern, whether you make it by hand or whether you use the pattern make tool to make it, comes with a no fill no stroke rectangle. The no fill no stroke rectangle marks out exactly where the pattern tile is. Everything inside here is pattern, everything outside is not pattern. It's also the exact size that we would need for our backgrounds. Let's see how we're going to use it. I'm going to the last panel. I'm going to open up the group. When you drag a pattern out of the swatches panel into a document, it always comes in a group. We're going to scroll down to the very last object, which is a no fill no stroke rectangle. You can see it here. Now, that no fill no stroke rectangle has to be there. We can't use this one, but we can use it to make a duplicate. I'll drag and drop it onto this little plus icon here. Now I have two no fill no stroke rectangles on this particular design. It's really important that I fill the one that's the second to bottom, because the one at the bottom absolutely has to be there. If it's not there, if it's filled with color or if doesn't exist, then the pattern is going to break, it's just not going to work. You must select the second to bottom one. Then we're going to fill it with a color. Let me just go and get a color that's definitely not in the design. Having done that, we've now added a background to our pattern. When we go to the last panel, we'll say second to last is our background, the very bottom is a no fill no stroke rectangle. Now I'm going to select absolutely everything. Just drag the mouse over to select everything. You could also press Control or Command A. Then we'll go to the swatches panel, and with the selection tool, we're just going to drag and drop this pattern into the swatches panel. Then because we've got it selected, we'll just press delete because we don't need it any longer. Let's go and test it with a document that is the size of scrapbook paper, the size of our art board. We'll target the fill, and let's fill it with our pattern. Now we can scale this. I'll choose object transform scale. I'm going to scale it at about 75 percent. I don't want to transform the object, just the pattern. I'll click Okay. Just ignore the fracture line that's appearing through the pattern. It's got nothing to do with what we're doing here. It's all about Illustrator being unable to display it correctly. We now know that we can add a background to a pattern by dragging the pattern out of the swatches panel. But let's go and prove to ourselves that this behaves as a regular pattern. Let's select the rectangle and let's go to the recolor artwork dialogue. I'll go to Edit, and I'm going to pick up the background color. This is why I chose a background color that was nowhere in use in the design, because it meant that I could very easily come and find that color. Now here, I want this color, but I'd like it to be a bit darker but I seem to have run out of darkness if you like. I can make adjustments down here, so I can reduce the brightness of the color. I can reduce its saturation. There's a lot of flexibility here in the dialogue, you just have to know where things are that you can access. Let's just make it this color. I'll click Okay. Now, as with every other pattern that we've recolored this way, we end up with the original and our new pattern. Now before we leave this pattern, let's go and see what happens if we want to edit the pattern. I don't think this is a particularly good idea, but let's see why. I'm just going to remove the rectangle that's filled with a pattern, and let's double-click on the pattern. When we open it in the pattern make tool, we're warned that there's a clipping mask created around the pattern tile bounds that preserves the legacy pattern appearance, in other words, the background that we've added to the pattern. For best results, release the clipping mask when changing the tile size or editing art that overlaps the tile edge. I'll just click Okay. Now, we can edit art that does not overlap the tile edge. Let me just go and get this cloud here. I'm going to move it and I'm going to rotate it. Now, It doesn't overlap the tile edge, so it's perfectly possible to change or edit that. It's perfectly possible to do something with this one as well, but it is not possible to do anything with the umbrellas that are overlapping the tile edge because of this clipping mask. If we have a look in the last pallet and open up this pattern, here is the clipping mask, and it's using a rectangle, this rectangle here, to clip only elements that are over the tile edge. Now, you can release that. Just come in here and select over absolutely everything. When you've got it selected, you can choose object, clipping mask, release. Then you can start moving around things that overlap the tile edge. You're just going to find that a bit difficult because this umbrella comes as a number of different pieces and there's actually a piece here, but if I just delete that, you'll see that there's another piece underneath as well. It's going to be a bit difficult to select absolutely everything that comprises an element that is overlapping the tile edge. I think that before you go and add a background to a pattern in the way that we've just done, you want to settle your pattern. You want to be pretty much 100 percent sure that that's the way you want your pattern to look like before you go and add a background to it. I'm just going to cancel out of here. Now, the process that we went through to add a background to our umbrella pattern means that we still got our original design here. We still got access to this original design anytime we want to make changes to it. If you go ahead and add a background to a pattern and then decide you don't like it for some reason, just get out of there. Go and edit the original, just by double-clicking on it, go and edit it, move things around, and then add your background as a last step. It's going to be a lot easier to do it that way than it is going to be to try and select everything through that clipping mask and then reinstate the clipping mask at the end. Workflow wise, I think it's a better option to treat this as your original pattern anytime you need to make a change to it, come in and make a change to the original pattern, and then drag it into the main work area, add your background to it, and then save that because it's simply going to be a whole lot easier than messing around with that clipping mask. 6. Pt 5 Preparing your Pattern for Spoonflower: Now, I mentioned Spoonflower at the start of this course. The reason why I mentioned Spoonflower was because when you upload to Spoonflower, you're not uploading a rectangle that is filled with a pattern, you're uploading the pattern's swatch itself. Let's have a look quickly at how we would prepare one of these swatches for Spoonflower. I'm going to do that with the most complex of these swatches, the umbrella swatch. I'm going to use the version that has the background in it. I'm again, just dragging and dropping it out of the swatches panel into the main work area. What we need to send to Spoonflower is something that is the exact size of this background. Let's go to the layers palette. When we drag a pattern out of the swatches panel, we already know it comes as a group. We also know that the very last object in this group is going to be a no fill, no stroke rectangle that is the exact size of the pattern tile. Well, to practice for Spoonflower, what you can do is this, you can drag this no fill, no stroke rectangle, and take it out, and place it immediately above the group. We've got the no fill, no stroke rectangle this time at the very top. We've broken our pattern, but what we want is something for Spoonflower, which is something completely different. I'm going to select the no fill, no stroke rectangle and my group, and I'm going to choose object clipping mask make. In this case, what I'm doing, is I'm using that no fill, no stroke rectangle to make a clipping mask that is the exact size of the pattern tile. This is what we would export for Spoonflower. Just to be clear that this is going to be a seamless repeat. When I drag this over here, it's immediately going to line up with this element here. We're creating a seamless repeat. But in this case, it's this pace that is the complete pattern swatch, and it's this that you would be uploading to Spoonflower. Now, you can do that exact same process of clipping a pattern using any of the patterns that we've created. Let's go and do that to the watermelon. Here's the watermelon pattern. Much larger pattern. Let's go to the layers pallet. Let's open up the group at the very last thing. The group is a no fill no stroke rectangle. Let's just target it, drag it above everything. Select everything. This time, I'm going to press "Ctrl" or "Command A". I'm going to choose object clipping mask make. Then, this is the pattern's swatch that we would then upload to Spoonflower. 7. Project and Wrapup: We've now finished the video content for this course, so it's over to you to complete your project. Your class project will be to take a pattern, either one of the patterns that I've given you, or a pattern of your choice, and to add a background to it. Now you'll need to look at your pattern and determine the way that's going to work. Post an image of your completed pattern with its background as your class project. Now as you were watching these videos, you will have had a prompt asking if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you did enjoy the class, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes, that you would recommend this class. Secondly, write even just a few words about 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. If you see the Follow link on the screen, then click it to keep up to date with my new classes as they're released. If you would like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name is 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 episode soon. 8. Bonus Method for Adding a Background to a Pattern: Now, since I recorded this video initially, I have discovered another way of adding a background to a pattern and this one is pretty foolproof. It's just a little bit tricky. I'm going to show you because I think it's really worthwhile learning. What you're going to do is go to your swatches panel and double-click on whatever swatch it is that you're working with. I'm going to my pattern options dialogue which will appear when I double-click on my swatch, I'm going to click on Show Tile Edge because I want to see where my pattern is and this is one of the patterns that we have looked at previously in this class. We discovered that it was difficult to put a background on because there were things overlapping on all four edges of the tile area. The first thing I'm going to do and this is really important, is to adjust this so that the width and height are whole numbers. I'm just clicking in the width and I'm just pressing the up arrow key now, I could take it to 480 or 481, it doesn't really matter. I'm going to draw the same with the height because I need to create a rectangle that is this exact size. Making a rectangle with a size that has numbers after the decimal point is just an invitation to things going really wrong. I'm going to note the size 480 by 372. I'm going to make sure I don't have anything selected at all. I'm going to make sure that the fill is targeted. I'm just going to click on the gradient to turn that pattern fill off and then I'm going to set a solid fill color. I'm just going to go and get a sort blue for this. Now I'm going to make my rectangle at this size. With the rectangle tool, I'll just click in the area of the pattern tile, and I'll type 480 and then 372 and click Ok. Now we're already familiar with what's happening here, so this shouldn't be a surprise. Our rectangle is still selected, I'm going to choose object and then arrange and send to back because that will send it behind the pattern so we can see what's going on. I'm going to click my selection tool. My rectangle is still selected, that's really important. You'll also want to see a fair bit of real estate around the area of your pattern because you're going to have to work out when you get this rectangle into the right place. Now, in the past, we've tried to align the rectangle with the pattern tile. This time I'm not going to, this time I'm just going to drag it, and we're going to drag it until we get it in a position where we're seeing our entire pattern. We're going to have to very carefully look around each of these major elements, these umbrellas, and just make sure they are whole umbrellas and they're not cut off at all. We don't want to re-size the rectangle at all. We don't want to rotate it, all we want to do is to move it, got my move tool here. Again, all we want to do is to move it around until we get it so that our pattern elements appear. You can see obviously this is not a good place for it, these things are cut off. If I go out in this direction, then I'm getting this umbrella back, but I'm not getting this umbrella. You will need to just look around and just make sure that you get this in the right place. This is a fairly simple pattern, so it's fairly easy for us to see that we've got it in the right place. If you had a really complex pattern, then it would be more difficult and you might need to do a bit of trial and error to do this. Now there are a couple of benefits of applying a background this way. One is that the background itself is inside the pattern swatch, so you don't have to add it later on or anything special. The second thing is that the pattern itself is going to remain fully editable. I'm going to click done because I've added this to the pattern. If I go back to the swatches panel and double-click on the pattern, you can see that's just opening back up in the pattern options dialog and I'm ready to edit again. The addition of a background to this pattern hasn't changed the editability of the patterns. I think it's a really good method, but you just will need to check really carefully to make sure that an actual fact the background has gone in the right place because there is no set way of lining it up. But you want it in a place where you can see all the content in your design. I'll just click done. Let's have a look at what this pattern looks like at work. Here is the pattern inside a rectangle and it's working perfectly. The background works perfectly. If we select the entire pattern, go to the re-color artwork tool click advanced options, and I'm going to click edit so I can get hold of this color here. I'm just going to unlink the harmony colors. Now I can match the background around and put it in the place that I want to see it in. When I'm happy with what I've got, I'll just click Ok and as before in the swatches dialogue, I've got the original pattern with its background and also this newly colored version. Of course, if you wanted to retain the version that didn't have a background in it, you should always drag your pattern onto the plus symbol here to make a duplicate and then just edit the duplicate so that you're not overwriting it, which is what I did when I added the background to the pattern in the first place. I think this method of adding a background to a pattern while a little bit tricky is certainly worthwhile experimenting with.