Hi, I was hoping someone here might be able to assist me. I’ve been making repeat patterns in Illustrator for awhile and I want to know how do I single out ONE square tile of my design that can be saved on its own? I.e. Isolate the tile itself in order to give it to someone else.
I know how the pattern becomes a swatch and then you can fill other shapes with it but how does one simply save ONE SINGLE tile of it? And without overhangs etc.
Thank you so much in advance! If there are some tutorials you can point me to… they are so hard to find.
Assuming your patterns are vector art with no effects:
Make a square
Fill it with your pattern
Object > Expand Appearance
Make another square and place it over the section of the pattern you want to give away. Be sure it is on top
Select all.
Pathfinder > Crop.
If you have effects or raster bits, expanding and cropping won’t always work right.
In that case:
Make a square
Fill it with your pattern
Make a square over the top of the part you want to give away.
Select all
Command + 7 (on a mac) or Object > Clipping Mask > Make.
All of the pattern will still be there under the mask though. You can use it as if it were just one square. However…Illustrator has a really dumb bug where you can’t place the masked part of a pattern off the art board. Darned annoying.