I haven’t been posting them, but I’ve been playing with seamless repeating patterns since the beginning of the year. While it’s mostly been flowers and other sort of geometric shapes, there was this one file I started with the intention to fill with as many unique, organic shapes as I could, and this pattern of sea critters started to take shape. It took me a three or four sesssions to finish it (over the course of several months!), but it’s finally done!

I learned a little trick while I was working on this one. I kept testing it out and in spite of all of the unique shapes, I was still really aware of exactly where the tiles were seaming. I had overlapping shapes, but it wasn’t until I started using certain motifs over again within the tile that the rhythm finally broke up enough for me and the pattern started to feel more natural to my eyes. The tiling isn’t 100% invisible, especially at this small size, but it’s a lot better than where it started (I don’t see any strong path of  white running through it anymore, for instance), and I’m really proud of this one

Tags: animals, art, ocean, patterns, sea life, vector

Three seamless patterns I made this morning

Surely there are more productive things I could be doing with my time. Especially because I can see the potential to sit around for hours moving individual elements in these patterns this way and that to keep any given pattern from looking too…tiley.

Fortunately I’m ultimately just not that obsessive, and thus I managed to make these fun little patterns in between waiting for video to render, or uploading some commercial to the server, or, y’know, whatever it was that I was supposed to have been doing this morning .

I have tiles suitable for desktops and backgrounds for websites. Shoot me a comment and I’ll make them available.

(previously, Seamless Repeating Patterns)

Tags: doodles, illustrator, monsters, patterns, seamless, vector

Attempt #1 - I don't know if you all know, but I can draw more than just cute critters!

I found this neat little tutorial about creating seamless repeating patters over on designsponge a few weeks ago and I decided to play with it this weekend. I turned them both into desktop wallpapers; just click on the one you like, and you can right-click>save as background.

I didn’t have anything in particular in mind when I started, but I had just heard an interview with the chick from Jefferson Airplane about the origin of the song White Rabbit, so this ended up being an Alice-themed pattern. I think the cat is neat, but I think I ended up with too much detail in the mushroom vignette for it to read well at the size it ended up being in the wallpaper. Also, the two vignettes don’t really overlap much so it’s not as impressive.

Attempt #2 - A Badger and a Snail in green. Still ended up a bit squarish.

The second one ended up working out a little better in terms of integrating the design together, but I think I’d be better off if I made a plan before I started. Anyway, they’re fun to do, and with practice I’ll get better at them.

If you’re downloading them as wallpapers, they should work for screensizes and dimensions similar to 1024×768. I only made one version each so if you need another size feel free to leave me a comment and I’d be happy to tile you up a different size.

Tags: alice in wonderland, art, badger, cheshire cat, design, drawing, patterns, snail