Seamless vector pattern of elegant swirls for Illustrator.
By Ars Grafik
This is a free seamless vector pattern of elegant swirls. Use the magic wand tool to change the colors in Illustrator. Grungify it by transferring the image into Photoshop and apply some brushes for a great background image… add gradients for even more of an effect.
Also included in the free pattern download is a lossless .png image so you can define it as a pattern in Photoshop for quick reference.
***Read this Before Downloading Patterns***
The file is an .ai file, so you can access the vector patterns in several ways. The easiest is just to download, unzip, and open the file in Illustrator. However, if you do only this, the patterns won’t be saved into your Swatch Library AND the file will look blank because it’s only meant to call up the swatches, so check in your swatches palette first before getting really frustrated at downloading a freaking blank Illustrator file.
To access the patterns all the time and in any document you’re working on in Illustrator, download and extract the file, then drop it into Illustrator’s Patterns folder. In Windows, this is in your C: drive under Program Files => Adobe => Adobe Illustrator => Presets => Swatches => Patterns. This way, the vector patterns will be part of your swatch library and you can call them up anytime. To locate the patterns, click on the drop down menu on your swatches palette, then select Open swatch library, then hover over User Defined….
There are so many ways to use these patterns—the possibilities are endless! You can use Illustrator’s Magic Wand tool to select and change specific colors within a pattern, add backgrounds, effects, and more.
Related Media
spread the love
Comments
12.10.09
You’ve got some really great work here. Thanks for being willing to share. Unfortunately for me I’m still running CS2 and when I download the elegant swirls pattern it tell me that it was created with a newer vesion of Illustrator. Is there anyway to “back” save to an older version? Or anything I can do on this end?
12.10.09
Thanks for the comment, Tricia.
Unfortunately, CS3 files only work in CS2 if they are saved separately as a special legacy version on my end. I’ve gone ahead and done this for the elegant swirls pattern, so try redownloading the pattern file and open the one ending in “cs2.ai”. As a solution to other downloads, all of our more recent patterns include a tileable, seamless, and lossless .png of the pattern. You can open this in Illustrator and define it as a swatch without even using the live trace option, then use it the same way you’d use any other pattern–since it’s a png it’ll define the white space as a transparency. You’ll want to play around with blending/layers or the magic wand tool to change the color.
Another option–it’s not always spot on, but you can also open the png in Illustrator and use the “Live trace” function to create an editable pattern, although I’d opt for the former solution.
08.05.10
[...] 10. Elegant Swirls Vector Patterns [...]