- In this movie, we're going to add these competing patterns
of paint splatters in the background.
But first, we need to bring back our Artists palette
by turning the palette layer back on.
And it seemed to me that this yellow blob
right there is too close to the brush,
so I'm going to select it with the black arrow tool
and then press shift up arrow,
followed by shift right arrow
to move it up and to the right 10 pixels.
All right, now go ahead and partially marquee
both the perimeter of the palette and its hole
in order to select them,
and then assuming your Fill is active here
inside the Swatches panel,
go ahead and set the fill color
to the shade of brown that begins with R 140
in order to create this initial effect here.
Now, we've got two problems.
One is the palette's in front of all the paint.
And to solve that problem,
go ahead and right click on the palette,
choose Arrange and then choose Send to Back.
The other problem is that the hole
is not currently a hole.
To make it one, you need to go up to the Object menu,
choose Compound Path and choose Make,
in order to produce this effect here.
All right, now you can go ahead
and turn off the template layer
because we don't need it anymore,
then click on the template to make it active.
And because it's usually helpful
to assign a background to its own layer,
go ahead and drop down to the tiny page icon
at the bottom of the layers panel
and alt + click or option+ click on it
to bring up the Layer Options dialogue box.
I'm going to go ahead and call this layer background
and change its color to let's say, green,
right there and click OK.
All right, now go ahead and zoom out
so that you can see the entire art board.
Select the rectangle tool,
which you can get by pressing the "m" key.
And assuming that your smart guides are turned on,
go ahead and draw from one corner
to the other of the red border
that represents the bleed.
All right, we don't want the background
to be this color, that's for sure.
So I'm going to change this stroke to None,
and then I'm going to zoom in
by pressing ctrl + 0 or cmd + 0 on the mac,
so that we can see these next two steps in vivid detail.
And what you want to do to access these patterns
is click on the little library icon
in the bottom left corner of the Swatches panel,
drop down to Patterns,
then go to Decorative,
and finally you want Vonster Patterns,
which is going to bring up
this little micro panel right here.
Now, if you want to better see what you're doing,
then click on the fly out menu icon
and choose Large Thumbnail View,
and that will provide you with a better view
of every single one of these patterns.
And then again, assuming that your Fill is active,
go ahead and select this guy right here, Bugaboo,
which is going to give you this pattern here.
All right, now I want to add another
pattern, Splatterz, in front of it,
and so I'm going to go up the Window menu
and choose the Appearance command
to bring up the Appearance panel
and then I'll go ahead and drop down
to the second icon in the bottom left corner,
Add New Fill, in order to add a new fill pattern.
And now make sure that Fill is selected
and go ahead and click on Splatterz
in order to add it to the mix.
And now you can go ahead and close this floating panel.
And now I'm going to switch back to the Layers panel
and I'm going to click in the lock column
in order to lock the background layer.
Now the thing about what we're seeing
is it's not entirely currently accurate,
and that's because Illustrator's GPU preview
has a few known issues, meaning that it's a bit buggy.
And so if you really want to see what's going on,
then go up the View menu
and choose Preview on CPU,
and you will see this more accurate,
and I think better interaction.
And that's how you add an eye-catching
paint splatter background to any piece of artwork
here inside Illustrator.