I'm glad I could help. Keep creating!

Thank you so much! I'm teaching 2D Design at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario in Canada. The 2D Design course is part of a one-year program called Art Fundamentals. Many students take the program in order to build their creative skills and improve their portfolios.

@@dansoelberg Well, what can I say - your students are lucky ones! Please tell them that!

Great question! If you want to stick to this method of making a pattern, the solution requires a little troubleshooting on your part. I have an alternate method that may be WAY easier for you, so I urge you to skip to my alternate method at the bottom of this comment. Here are a few things to check: 1) Check that all your background squares/rectangles that go to the edge of your artboard have no stroke. 2) Go to VIEW (in the top menu) and scroll down to check SNAP TO GRID. Then adjust the corners of your background square to make sure they snap to the artboard corners. 3) As an alternative to step 2, move all background squares off your artboard and recreate them by choosing the rectangle tool. Make sure you have a fill colour and no stroke. Click on your artboard and input the dimensions of your artboard. Then move the new shape until it clicks into the edges of your artboard. There's a MAKE PATTERN option in Illustrator! Here's my tutorial video: kzbin.info/www/bejne/opatc4egZp2Vo5I The video is time stamped by the steps in the video description, so click "make a pattern" to skip to that step. This method makes a seamless pattern out of the foreground objects only. You can add your background as a flat coloured shape afterwards. This alternate method may not work the first time you do it if your background also has seamless shapes, but Adobe Illustrator has so many options and features that there's always a solution to every problem. Hope this works!

@@dansoelberg The same happened to me and I checked that there was no stroke and that it went to the edge and it still didn't work

Great question! As an experienced Adobe Illustrator user myself, I would likely do exactly what you are suggesting: use a photo as a guide and recreate the vector shapes with the pen. When I'm teaching students who work exclusively traditionally (no digital experience) and have no interest in Adobe Illustrator, I try to meet them where they are rather than impose unwelcome demands on them. I've learned that different approaches to digital tools work better for neurodivergent brains. When you have zero experience with the pen tool and you have an impatient ADHD brain (as many creative people do), trying to master the pen feels tedious, cumbersome and frustrating. I don't want students to give up so easily. I developed this method to make Illustrator feel more accessible so that beginners can learn how vector anchors work by editing them, rather than creating them from scratch. So far, I'm getting positive feedback, but I'm always open to changing and improving my teaching methods. I believe that learning how to use Adobe Illustrator is an invaluable skill that can elevate a creator's work and open doors for them professionally.

I don't remember saying that, but that's totally something I would say!

Thanks! I'm glad the video helped you.