Creating Awesome Patterns (Part 2 of 2)

Using Adobe Illustrator CC to create a repeat pattern using a tile generated in Adobe Capture CC.

6 min readMar 28, 2017

In Part 1, we used Adobe Capture CC to generate a pattern tile that we’re now going to recreate in a vector format using Adobe Illustrator. (Capture CC’s pattern feature is geared more for use in Photoshop, but I like my patterns to be vector. Infinite scalability, y’all. 😎)

Step 1: Create Your Document

To get started, let’s create a new document in Illustrator. It doesn’t matter what the dimensions are — we’re just gonna hide the artboard anyway 😉.

Step 2: Import Your Pattern Tile

Import your pattern tile into Illustrator. I like to just drag and drop it in.

Note: The tiles generated by Capture CC are large, so you may want to shrink it down a bit. Drag from a corner holding shift + alt to maintain proportions.

To make things easier on yourself, go ahead and set the width and height of the tile to whole numbers. For mine, I’m setting it at 256px wide x 148px tall.

Note: When you make one of the dimensions a whole number, the other may have a few decimal places. No problem, just click that little chain link and round to the closest whole number. 👍

If you’re working on a smaller screen, these fields are hidden inside of a “Transform” link in the top toolbar.

…and you might as well go ahead and hide that artboard by hitting ⌘+Shift+H.

Step 3: Set Up Guides

There’s a good chance the shapes you create when drawing over this pattern tile will need to mirrored, moved, rotated, etc., so it will help you if you have guides that establish your horizontal and vertical center points.

I like to draw my own guides. To create a guide, draw a line with the line tool (\) while holding shift to ensure straightness. Turn that line to a guide by hitting ⌘+5.

Copy it (⌘+C), paste it in place (⌘+F), and rotate (R) your copy 180 degrees. Your guides should now be in the shape of a “+” sign.

Use the align tools to center the guides vertically and horizontally to your pattern tile.

Step 4: Draw Your Basic Shapes

Essentially, we want to find the shapes that make up the pattern tile and re-draw them on top of the image. Before you start on this step, be sure your Smart Guides are turned on (View > ✔︎ Smart Guides).

On my image, I basically have:

A black and white hexagon
Three black and white equilateral triangles
A funky yellow equilateral-esque triangle

Note: You will need some basic knowledge of Illustrator to in order to be efficient on this step.

Now, without further or due, put on some 🎶 and draw those basic shapes!

It was easier for me to draw my shapes with my pattern tile rotated 90 degrees.

Step 5: Move Shapes Into Place

Group the basic shapes you just created by selecting them and pressing ⌘+G. We’ll have to duplicate and situate its copies so that this thing will look right when tiled.

Hold alt while you drag your group (this should create a copy) to the top right corner of your tile (we’ll call this copy “Group 2” — profound, I know). Line your shape up to be centered on that right edge of the tile . Look for that pink smart guide to help you.

This new group you’ve lined up will make moving more groups into place easy. Hit RETURN on your keyboard to bring up the Move dialog box. We’re going to be editing the Position text fields. Remember when we set our tile dimensions to whole numbers a few minutes ago? You’ll be using those values here.

My tile is 148px x 256px and I need to move a copy of Group 2 to the left 148 pixels. To do this, I’ll type “-148 px” into the Horizontal text field as shown below. Be sure to hit the “Copy” button, not “OK”.

Now, highlight both those top groups, hit RETURN again, and this time, you’ll want to move it down to the bottom of your tile, using your Height dimension — for me that was 256px.

Here’s a look at my process.

Step 7: Prepare to Mask

Obviously we’re going to need to trim all this excess to fit inside our pattern tile. In order to do this, we’ll create a clipping mask. But first, go ahead and…

Create a rectangle the same dimensions as your source image (in my case 148px x 256px)
Color that rectangle the background color of your pattern (you can use the eyedropper tool (i) to color sample the background color of your source image.)
Use the align tools to horizontally and vertically center it with your source image, and send it to the back (⌘+Shift+[).
Delete your source image and the guides you created earlier.

Step 7: Create A Clipping Mask

We’re ready for our mask.

Make a copy (⌘+C) of that rectangle you just made
Paste it in place (⌘+F).
If it didn’t paste on top of everything bring it to the front (⌘+Shift+]).
Highlight everything and right-click. Choose “Make Clipping Mask” from the list.

Lookin’ good, eh? But we’re not quite done just yet…

Step 8: Merge Your Shapes

I know this thing looks done, but if we want it to be a repeat pattern we can use as a swatch in Illustrator, we have a one thing we must do: Merge it all. To set up for the merger, select your pattern and choose Object > Expand > ✔︎ Fill and ✔︎ Stroke (you may need to perform this action more than once to get everything expanded — it depends on the way you drew your shapes). You will know you’re ready to continue when you look at your fill and stroke in your left toolbar and there isn’t a stroke anymore.

Nice.

Now, use the Pathfinder tool to merge all your shapes (if you’re not sure where to locate Pathfinder, just go up to Window > Pathfinder). Highlight your pattern tile and choose the merge option.