Monday 12 September 2011

Creating Stripes in Illustrator using Patterns and Live Paint

I recently wanted to fill in a circle is some stripes in Illustrator, but alas it was not self explanatory. After looking it up on the old reliable internet I found quite a few posts describing a technique of copying and pasting lines throughout. Not really what I wanted to hear. The process I wanted was something along the lines of:

Mythical solution (does not really work this way, although I would like it to)

  1. Get the fill tool
  2. Select "Stripes"
  3. Fill object

I decided to investigate myself. I finally came up with a pretty close technique.
Making two lines into a "Pattern"
  1. Draw a line and make it a stroked colour of some thickness
  2. Copy and Paste it next to the first, making it stroke a different colour
  3. Select both lines and go to - Edit > Define Pattern
  4. Click on "Live Paint" from the left toolbar
  5. From the Fill Colour box at the top you can select the striped pattern you just made
  6. Click on the object you want to fill with stripes
Star filled with striped pattern
To change the colour of the stripes:
Changing the colour of pattern using
"Recolor Artwork"
  1. Select the fill (double click on it).
  2. Select "Recolor Artwork"
  3. Go get the option to change each of the colours in the fill:

Just found this post which describes a similar process using boxes, and dragging the boxes into the "Swatches" to create a pattern. Also how to rotate it, simply right click > Transform > Rotate  and tick "Pattern". Nice.
Rotating a pattern

1 comment: