I am making a repeat pattern with some paths I turned into organic shapes that I traced over an artwork. It is however quite a lengthy process to make it seamless repeat tile in pattern editing mode as I am matching up the shapes in the pattern editing mode with the pen tool overlapping one path over another and making sure it lines up but I can't merge the two using the shapebuilder tool. I am wondering if there is a better way to do this or rather just make an artwork thats easy to repeat from the beginning?
Sometimes I like to create artwork, or trace something I like and then make it seamless in the pattern editing mode but it can get really complicated especially with live traced path heavy illustrations.
This was the original artwork traced using the pen tool
This is me trying to make it seamless using the pen tool in pattern mode overlapping paths and making sure that they match to look seamless.