Create a four-colour pattern swatch

With crazy prints, hand-drawn textures and bold colours working their way into fashion, it’s handy to know how to achieve prints that utilise these trends. It’s perfectly possible to design your own fabric, apply it to T-shirts, cushions, tea towels and more with a few simple Illustrator tricks.

In this project we’ll create a pattern swatch that’s ready to send off into the world of print. I’ll walk through how to design a functional swatch using the basic guidelines of a square, and cover how to apply Illustrator’s Pathfinder tools to finalise your swatch, ready to take your designs from screen to fabric.

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The Creative Bloq team is made up of a group of design fans, and has changed and evolved since Creative Bloq began back in 2012. The current website team consists of eight full-time members of staff: Editor Georgia Coggan, Deputy Editor Rosie Hilder, Ecommerce Editor Beren Neale, Senior News Editor Daniel Piper, Editor, Digital Art and 3D Ian Dean, Tech Reviews Editor Erlingur Einarsson and Ecommerce Writer Beth Nicholls and Staff Writer Natalie Fear, as well as a roster of freelancers from around the world. The 3D World and ImagineFX magazine teams also pitch in, ensuring that content from 3D World and ImagineFX is represented on Creative Bloq.