Filling Shapes with Colors and Patterns
Do your shapes seem a little empty inside? To help your ideas stand out on-screen, use LayOut's Fill features to add a pop of color, and use the Pattern features to create hatches, which symbolize materials in architectural drawings, as shown in the following figure.
To fill a shape with a color, you use the Fill settings on the Shape Style panel. To add a pattern, start with the Pattern settings on the Shape Style panel, and then use the Pattern Fill panel to customize the pattern. LayOut includes a selection of patterns, or you can import an image file into LayOut as a pattern. The following sections walk you through the steps.
Table of Contents
Filling a shape with a color
Whatever shape you want to fill, simply draw the shape and then follow these steps:
- With the Select tool (), select the shape in the drawing area.
- Open the Shape Style panel by clicking its title bar. (If you don't see the panel on-screen, select Window > Shape Style from the menu bar.)
- Click the Fill option, which becomes highlighted, as shown in the following figure. Clicking the Fill option tells LayOut you want to apply Fill settings to the selection. >
- Click the color well next to the Fill option.
- In the Colors panel that appears, select a fill color for your shape. See Choosing Colors for help navigating the options in the Colors panel.
- To see the result, click a blank spot in the drawing area so that your shape is deselected. In the following figure, you see that the two lines are filled with dark blue, which will add a little color to the document.
Adding a pattern
To fill a shape with a pattern, follow these steps:
- With the Select tool (), select the shape you want to fill with a pattern.
- Open the Shape Style panel by clicking its title bar. (If you don't see the panel on-screen, select Window > Shape Style from the menu bar.)
- Click the Pattern option, which becomes highlighted. Clicking the Pattern option tells LayOut you want to fill the selected shape with a pattern. Your shape is filled with a default pattern, and the Pattern Fill panel opens, as shown in the following figure.
- In the Pattern Fill panel, make sure All Patterns is selected from the drop-down list at the top of the panel.
- Select a folder from the available options to choose one of LayOut's preset patterns. If you'd like to use a custom pattern, you need to import the pattern image first, as explained in the following section, Importing a custom pattern. In the following figure, you see the Black Pen 1 pattern, which you find by selecting the Tonal Patterns > Sketchy Pen Lines subfolder in the Pattern Fill panel.
Tip: In the upper right of the Pattern Fill panel, you can choose to see the available patterns in Thumbnail View or List View. If you want to choose a pattern that you've applied elsewhere in your document, click the Home icon in the upper left, and a list of all the patterns in your LayOut document appears.
- (Optional) To rotate the pattern, select an option from the Rotate drop-down menu. Or type a rotation value in degrees and press Enter.
- (Optional) To increase or decrease the pattern's size, select a preset option from the Scale drop-down menu. Or type a value in the Scale box (such as 5x) and press Enter. However, because patterns are raster-based, remember that the higher the scale factor, the more pixelated your image may appear.
Importing a custom pattern
If you have a graphics file that you'd like to use as a pattern, you can import the file into LayOut, which supports the following raster image file formats: .bmp
, .dib
, .jpg
or .jpeg
, .jpe
, .jfif
, .gif
, .png
, .tif
or .tiff
After you save the file to your hard drive, follow these steps:
- In your LayOut document, open the Pattern Fill panel by clicking its title bar. If the panel isn't visible on-screen, select Window > Pattern Fill.
- From the drop-down list at the top of the panel, select Import Custom Pattern.
- In the Open dialog box that appears, navigate to your file, select it, and click Open. The file appears in the In-Document Patterns area of the Pattern Fill panel. Now you can follow the steps in the earlier section, Adding a pattern, to use the image as a pattern in your LayOut document.
In the following figure, you see a custom hammer graphic that was imported into LayOut and used to fill a rectangle.
To insert a single instance of an image, such as a company or client logo, see Inserting Images.