🎉 Try Slides With Friends — Zoom Trivia, Live Polls, Icebreakers & more! Check it out →
Create a Pattern Background with Beautiful, Eye Catching Shapes

Create a Pattern Background with Beautiful, Eye Catching Shapes

Pattern Backgrounds in Illustrator

It's a newer trend — using organic shapes to make beautiful compositions for on labels, flyers, backgrounds and often as a textile or wrapping papers patterns. Making a pattern for a background is an easy task if you use the right tools, no matter the original pattern source. Today, you will learn how to make a beautiful pattern in Illustrator using your own handmade shapes.

Step 1

In a white paper sheet, using a Pen or a Marker draw a few shapes and some line strokes. Don't worry about being perfect, they will look better with a more natural style once we make our pattern.

Step 2

With your shapes and strokes ready, scan it at a resolution between 400 and 600 dpi and using a high contrast setup.

Step 3

Open the scanned image in Illustrator, be sure to have it selected and go to Window > Image Trace.

Step 4

Click over the "Advanced" icon to show more options for the Image Trace and use the following values.

Step 5

Hit the "Expand" button in the top toolbar to apply the tracing.

Step 6

Go to Object > Ungroup and freely duplicate, rotate, scale and distribute the elements on the canvas to your liking.

Step 7

Apply a solid color only on a few of the shapes. In this case i will pick a yellow one but you are free to pick any color combination that you like.

Step 8

Select all the elments (Ctrl+A) and go to Object > Pattern > Make.

Step 9

In the Pattern Options Panel, click over the Pattern Tile Tool icon.

Step 10

Drag the Center Top anchor point down until you see a part of the generated pattern overlap with the original one as shown.

Step 11

Now, drag the Center Left anchor point until a part of the generated pattern overlap with the original one.

Step 12

In the top toolbar, click over "Done".

Step 13

You can now see that the pattern was added to the Swatches Panel (Window > Swatches).

Step 14

To test the recently created pattern, remove all elements from the artboard and make a new rectangle with the same artboard dimensions.

Step 15

With the rectangle still selected, click over the recently created pattern in the Swatches Panel.


Comments

X

You've successfully logged in!