The Swatches Palette stores colours to use it in designs. It can store vector data and those vectors can be applied as fills or strokes. This short illustrator tutorial will help you to understand the power of using seamless patterns in the Swatches Palette.
Open a new document.
Open the Swatches Palette and click the arrow on the upper right-hand side of the palette. From the fly out menu choose Open Swatch Library > Other Library > and locate the swatch on your hard drive. If you save the swatch to your Adobe Preset Swatches folder, this swatch will be available in the User Defined folder.
Choose the rectangle tool and draw a rectangle.
Select the rectangle and click on the pattern in the Swatches Palette to apply a pattern to the rectangle’s fill. The shape should be filled with vertically spaced black lines.
If you only need spaced out vertical lines, you can stop here. But in this tutorial, we are going a step further and show you how to apply transformations to this shape without altering the shape.
Choose the rectangle and right click on it. From the menu, choose Transform > Rotate. When the Rotate Dialog Box appears, rotate the lines 45 degrees by unchecking Objects and by checking Patterns.
Right click on the rectangle again. Choose Transform > Scale. Check the preview and Patterns boxes and uncheck Scale Strokes & Effects and Objects. Select the Uniform radio button and scale the pattern. The pattern will get larger and smaller depending on the percentage you enter.
