Now that you ve seen how much fun pattern fills can be, you re ready to create your own custom fills. Pattern fills are no more than Illustrator objects ”repeated over and over to fill a path . They can be composed of strokes, fills, text, and/or shapes . Unfortunately, you can t use gradients, blends, many filters and effects, or bitmap images in pattern fills. Nor can you include objects to which a mask has been applied in a pattern fill.
After you have created a swatch, you can name that swatch by double-clicking on it in the Swatches palette. This opens the Swatch Options dialog box. Swatch options vary depending on the type of swatch you are creating, but all swatches allow you to assign a custom name in the Swatch Name area of the dialog box.
To delete a swatch from the palette, select the swatch and choose Delete Swatch from the Swatches palette menu. You can also edit a pattern after you create it. To edit a pattern swatch, drag the swatch onto the artboard and edit it as you would any object.
You can take a block of text and simply have it repeat to fill an object. The first step is to create a block of text. Chapters 8 “10 examined text blocks in detail, but if you re not in the mood to go look that up, you can quickly create a block of text by selecting the Type tool, clicking on the artboard, and typing text.
After you ve created a block of text, you can drag that text into the Swatches palette, as shown in Figure 18-7.
Tip | Make sure that the Show Pattern Swatches tab is selected. Use the icon at the bottom of the palette to select it. |
Once your pattern fill has been added to the Swatches palette, you can select any object and click the swatch you made (in the Swatches palette) to apply that fill to the selected object. Figure 18-8 shows a text swatch being assigned to fill the hip-hop figure. After you place your new fill, hold down the tilde key while you click and drag on the fill inside the shape to adjust how the fill appears within it.
Any graphic object can be used as a fill. It s a simple, three-step process. First, create a graphic object. Second, drag it into the Swatches palette, as shown in Figure 18-9.
Finally, select an object to be filled, and click on the swatch, as shown in Figure 18-10.
For more complex fills that involve many paths or shapes, you will often want to use a bounding box to define the positioning and spacing of the tiles that make up your fill. In this context, bounding box means something different than the outline of a path that displays when you choose View Show Bounding Box. Here the term refers to a shape (usually a square) that defines the outer limit of the tile you create for a pattern fill.
This concept is best explained with an example. Try these steps to create a pattern using a bounding box:
Draw several shapes within a small area.
Draw a square over the shapes you ve just drawn. Assign no fill to the square, and no stroke.
With the square selected, choose Object Arrange Send To Back to move the square behind the shapes. Your illustration should look something like the one in Figure 18-11.
Figure 18-11: Collecting objects in a bounding box
Use the Selection tool to select both the square and all the objects inside it. Drag the selected group of objects into the Swatches palette.
Note | Make sure the Show Pattern Swatches icon at the bottom of the Swatches palette is selected. |
Draw a shape and apply your new fill to it. Click in the middle of the object to select the fill with the Selection tool, hold down the tilde key, and adjust the display of the pattern fill. Because you used a square as a bounding box for your tile, your fill can be more complex and irregular than if you simply dragged a shape into the pattern Swatches palette. The result is shown in Figure 18-12.
Figure 18-12: Applying a swatch created with a bounding box
Sometimes you want to create fills that don t look like they are tiled images. For example, if you look closely at the roof in Figure 18-13, you ll see that the fill is created by tiling a swatch. The pattern that the swatch was created from is also shown in the figure.
Tiling fill swatches must mesh together to create a pattern that appears seamless. You can test and edit your swatch by creating duplicates and aligning them to see how they fit together, as shown in Figure 18-14.
Tip | You'll probably want to view grids (View Show Grid) and turn on Snap to Grid (View Snap to Grid) when you are designing swatches that will tile seamlessly ”these will help you align objects within the swatch to the top, bottom, left, and right edges of the bounding box. |
After you ve tweaked your pattern so that it tiles smoothly, you can then save it as a swatch.