I recently received an email from Zosia asking me an Illustrator question. Zosia had a vector shape of Africa in Illustrator and wanted to fill the shape with a texture. It’s not as difficult as you might think, but for those of you new to Illustrator, this is a very useful thing to know. You can’t actually “clip” or “cut out” the shape from your texture, but it’s very easy to make a mask, and you still get the same effect.

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If you’ve ever run into this annoying little Illustrator problem, it can be very frustrating, but it has a simple fix. Every so often you may find that no matter what color you select, Illustrator converts your selection to grayscale…

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I gotten a few emails recently about how to create a seamless diagonal pattern in Illy, so here we go! Illustrator comes with some default pattern brushes, but no diagonal love. Diagonal patterns are a bit more tricky to make than a simple horizontal, or vertical pattern, but with some rock solid alignment, and some manual input into the Transform palette, you’ll be making diagonal patterns in no time. Let’s get started.

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Here’s a quick and dirty way to space objects using Illustartor’s Blend tool. Havent done a video in a while, or an Illy post, so it’s back to the basics this week! Hope you like it :)

Illustrator: Blend Tool Spacing from Jay Hilgert on Vimeo.

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Here’s round 2 of the Ask BB series. Some of these questions came in via email, and others via twitter (@bittbox), so If you have a question, let me know. When I get enough questions that I can answer, you might see your question here next time around :) Thanks to everyone for sending in your questions. Let’s get started.

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