Hand-drawn diagonal patterns in Illustrator ~ Elan Creative Co.

I love stripes! I have so many striped t-shirts, and I’m even wearing stripes right now. My favorite kind of striped patterns are the ones drawn by hand using ink and markers.

A while ago, I showed you how to make seamless hand-drawn striped patterns, and now I’m back with another tutorial in which I want to show you how to make seamless hand-drawn diagonal patterns in Illustrator.

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How to make seamless hand-drawn diagonal striped patterns in Illustrator

If you don’t want to scan your drawings, you can use a drawing tablet to create your stripes.

For this tutorial, I used black brush pens to draw the lines. After that, I scanned and digitized the lines in Illustrator.

Place the lines on the artboard, select all of them and go to Object > Transform > Rotate and rotate them 45°.

I like to use different colors for them. So I will select each line and change its color.

If you select all of them now and go to Object > Pattern > Make (in Illustrator CS5 or newer) and try to make a pattern that’s the same size as your artboard, you will get this:

This is clearly now what we are looking for. The lines overlap and the pattern looks messy. But if you delete half of them, this is what happens:

This is very similar to the final result. All we have to do is fill in the gaps.

When you make diagonal patterns, it doesn’t matter if they are stripes or diagonal floral patterns, you must add the graphics on one side of the artboard. The items should intersect two sides that are next to each other.

I will go back to the original image and delete a few lines. Here’s how my pattern looks now:

The lines are on half of the artboard, without crossing the artboard’s diagonal.

At this point, you can use the manual method to create the seamless pattern, or select all of them and go to Object > Pattern > Make and use the pattern tool.

The first thing I do is change the width and height of the pattern to the same size as my artboard (6x6in).

There are a few methods you can use to fill in the gaps. You can use the Blob Brush tool to add the missing lines, use the Direct Selection tool to move the anchor points and connect the lines, or create another line with the Pen tool.

As I showed you in the video above, I like to use all these tools and create seamless patterns that still have that hand-drawn look.

This is my final hand-drawn diagonal pattern:

When you are happy with the way your pattern looks, click Done and the pattern will be added to the swatches panel.

How to save seamless hand-drawn diagonal patterns in Illustrator

If you use the pattern tool and want to save the pattern tile, just use the Rectangle tool (M) to make a square that’s the same size as your artboard or pattern tile (in my example both are 6x6in).

This pattern is seamless and you can save it as a JPEG or PNG by going to File > Export > Export as.

If you want, you can add a background by creating another rectangle using the fill color you want. Align it to the diagonal stripes, then go to Object > Arrange > Send to Back (Shift + Ctrl + [ ).