Collecting pattern swatches together

[Gfunk7979]

Hello,

Apologies if this has already been asked and answered - I couldn't find my answer.

I use Illustrator (2015 as it's the latest version my Macbook can run successfully) for my surface design art and have got the hang of creating the pattern swatches, however I cannot for the life of me work out how to move my created pattern from the document swatch to a new swatch so they can all be collected together. Drag and drop doesn't work (although it does for colours).

Sorry if I'm not explaining myself clearly, but basically I want all my created patterns in the one swatch that I can load into a document as needed.

Thanks in advance for your advice....

[Ashutosh_Mishra]

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out. Would you mind sharing your workflow so that we can understand the issue better? You may share screenshots or a small video of workflow.

I'd also recommend checking out help article https://helpx.adobe.com/in/illustrator/using/patterns.html to know more about patterns in Illustrator.

Hope it helps.

Regards,

Ashutosh

[Gfunk7979]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. I'm not sure screenshots would help in this case, but I'll try and explain my issue in a different way. I don't think my original request was very clear.

So I select my objects I want in my pattern, define that pattern and that pattern then appears in the document swatch. But I don't want my patterns to be in the original document swatch. I want all my patterns in a seperate swatch that I can load in to any document. I created a new swatch called My Patterns, but I cannot figure out how to copy the pattern from the document swatch into the My Patterns swatch.

I've tried loading the My Patterns Swatch into the document before I define the patterm thinking the defined pattern would automatically save in there, but no it saves it into the default document swatches panel.

Clicking and dragging the pattern from one swatch to the other does not work. So how do I move the pattern from one swatch to the other? 

[Larry G. Schneider · Accepted solution]

You are not referring to the objects correctly. A swatch is a single unit which can contain a pattern or a color (including gradients). A grouping of Swatches is a library. You can place an object with the pattern applied into a new document which should bring the pattern swatch into the new document. When you have added all the patterns to the document, save it to the Swatch folder in your user folder. To use in another document, go to the Swatch Panel and navigated to your saved file and open. If you check Persistent from the panel flyout menu it should be available each time you reopen AI.

[Gfunk7979]

Ah ok thank you! I'm coming from Affinity Designer so still learning the new terms. Seems a bit cumbersome, but at least I know how to do it now. It just seems strange to me that you can't drag and drop between libraries, but I suppose there's some technical reason for it. Thanks again!