Seamless Pattern Help

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
October 27, 2022
4 replies
2823 views

I have tried to create seamless patterns over the last few days and getting varied success.

I firstly followed YouTube tutorials which create an artboard (say 150px2) .. add the artwork, duplicate in front and add 150px to the Y axis and again to the X axis. Fill the middle freely. Group and expand the artwork. Toggle vision off on the artwork layer and create a new layer to form a bounding box. Toggle view back on artwork layer. Use Pathfinder and crop. Drag pattern to the library and it should be complete.

This does not work for me. I watched a few different tutorials and they all followed the same steps so I am wondering if there is an error in the above process.

Secondly, I opted for illustrators pattern tool. Patterns appear to be ok when making, save as PNG or JPEG. When then opening the PNG or JPEG files the patterns are not saved in the library and when added and used do not align correctly.

Images below for reference.

Halloween Pattern is the result of the YouTube tutorials and the Skate pattern is a result of illustrators pattern tool.

This topic has been closed for replies.

Ton Frederiks

Adobe Expert

I am not sure what you are doing, but your examples show a wrong boundery of your pattern tiles.

Double click the pattern in the Swatches panel and correct the tile.

xmrslxAuthor

Inspiring

Could you explain a little more? How do I correct the tile? What is wrong with it? My brain is frazzled 😞

Ton Frederiks

Adobe Expert

If you can share one of your pattern problem files, we could check where it goes wrong and help to find a solution.

You can share .ai files using CC file sharing, DropBox, Google share, WeTransfer...

Mike_Gondek10189183

Adobe Expert

You drag the artwork to the swatches, not library to make a pattern. No need to group or crop.

Fill patterns tile only the artwork within the pattern bounding box—an unfilled and unstroked (non-printing) rectangle backmost in the artwork. For fill patterns, the bounding box acts as a mask. Therefore you need to

make a 150 x 150 px rectangles put that in back
set your keyboard increment to 150 px
Sprinkle a few graphic items the border edge.
Duplicate those items on top
Then use the cursor key to move copies to the mirrored edges.

xmrslxAuthor

Inspiring

I'm so confused.

I followed the video above to a tee. Every single step. Pattern looks great on the tile and when I create a bigger rectangle in the same artboard it looks perfect. No seams/joins or distortions. I export the PNG.

Open a new artboard and copy the PNG file to it. Drag it to the swatches panel and create a rectangle the size of my artboard. Fill the rectangle with the pattern and this happens (photo attached). It's not seamless at all and I don't know what I am doing wrong.

The objective is to sell these patterns - I can't sell the patterns not knowing if the customer is going to experience issues like I am 😞

Doug A Roberts

Adobe Expert

Can you show a screenshot of the pattern on the artboard before you export to PNG?

I'm not sure exactly what you're doing wrong, but if you drag the pattern (before exporting) out of Swatches on to the artboard, you'll see it has an invisible box bounding the actual pattern area. That's the bit you want to export, so you need an artboard that matches it:

Monika Gause

Adobe Expert

Don't put a background into the pattern.

Instead via the appearance panel add another fill and apply a fill color.

I don't understand what you wrote about the JPEG file not having a pattern in the swatches. Of course not. There will only be swatches and patterns in them in an AI file.

xmrslxAuthor

Inspiring

Thank you for your reply. I usually have my pattern with a transparent background and layer it on top of a filled layer - would this not do the same as your suggestion?