how to remove these blue boxes without deleting my drawing (so that the artboard can be resized without whitespace)

Question

Question:

How can I get rid of the white space around my graphic so that the artboard can be fitted to the graphic itself?

Observed behavior:

Object->Artboards->"Fit to selected art" crops the artboard to the edge of the blue boxes highlighted in the image below. I tried to fix this by deleting the blue boxes but that also deletes the purple/green/blue graphic shown in the picture below.

Expected behavior:

Normally, I would be able to Object->Artboards->"Fit to selected art". This would automatically crop the artboard to the edge of the purple/green/blue graphic in the picture below.

Answer 1

From what you are describing it sounds like the boxes are grouped with your artwork. Check in your layers panel. It's quite hard to give you precise advice without seeing the layers panel to see how this has been constructed.

This may work: Ungroup everything until there are no groups left, and select and delete the boxes. Regroup your artwork if necessary.

Another possibility is that these bounding boxes are clipping masks, if so then release them, and delete them. If the artwork is a raster image, you may have to make a new clipping mask and apply it to the image.