Pattern Fills

We’ve covered quite a bit about gradients of various types up to this point, but what if we’d rather fill our shape with a repeating pattern instead? Inkscape allows us to fill our shapes with its built-in patterns through the Fill and Stroke dialog, by clicking the Pattern Fill button directly to the right of the Mesh Gradient button, as shown in Figure 8.26.

Figure 8.26 – Selecting the Pattern Fill option in the Fill tab of the Fill and Stroke dialog

At the time of writing, this gives us the default Stripes 1:1 pattern fill (though it may show some other default as more patterns are added in the future), which you can see in the new (as of Inkscape 1.3) pattern menu along with other options. Switching to the Node tool, we can then see the pattern handles inside the pattern-filled object.

Note that if you’re using an older version of Inkscape, the handles may be somewhere else on the page (you may have to look...