: How to make certain area transparent in Illustrator I have a rectangle with a grid pattern as fill: Now I want the white part to be transparent so I can add a background image to it. I

@Cugini998

Drag your pattern out of the swatch panel
Make white invisible (for some patterns this means you may need to make a new bounding box.)
Drag the pattern back to the swatch panel.


Either alt drag and overwrite the old pattern.
Or make a new pattern and reapply.





Image 1: Timelapse of the process

Some closing thoughts. I wouldn't use a pattern for a grid there are several reasons for this but simply put it's not very efficient. In any case it should take no time to recreate the pattern form scratch.

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@Mendez620

Ok, try this.


Select your rectangle.
Go Object > Expand Appearance.
Now select one background 'tile' from the rectangle's background and go Select > Same > Fill & Stroke to select all of the background tiles.
Hit Delete.


Alternatively, use one of Illustrator's built-in grid pattern swatches, which have no background colour. In the Swatches panel, click the drop-down and go Open Swatch Library > Patterns > Basic Graphics and you'll find a whole heap of grids. Or, create your own pattern tile and convert that into a pattern swatch (simply make something, group it and drag it into the Swatches panel).

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@Shakeerah625

Please do the following Step:


Select the rectangle
Go to Object > Rasterize
Set Background to Transparent (see below)

Keep the rectangle selected and go Image Trace > Line Art

You are done :)

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