seamless pattern

Colouring Page – 14 April 2023

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I’ve created an unusual, for me, colouring page for members of the Angela Porter’s Coloring Book Fans facebook group. It’s a tesselated/tiled pattern created using one of my recent mandalas.

It’s a lot of fun to use my artwork in an app called Repper and create new, geometric patterns from it.

I did have to redraw the basic unit (tile) of the pattern to clean it up and remove some tiny details. But that let me adjust the pattern a little too.

For my coloured example, I used a palette of medieval illuminated manuscript inspired colours – red, green, gold and blue almost jewel tones.

The colour really does help to make sense of the pattern. It also brings out different ways in which the different layers and motifs are joined together, which really makes me smile!

It’s not until I look at it now that I can see the way the contrast and highlights have added a lot of layers and depth to the design.

I may have to do more of these in the future; they’re just so much fun!

Seamless Tile Pattern

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Seamless Tile Pattern © Angela Porter 2019

Today has been a bit of a busy day for me. I thought I’d spend a bit of time trying to reduce the level of anxiety I’m feeling at the moment by playing with my second mandala of yesterday in RepperPro. This is just one of twelve patterns I created quickly before dashing off out to a meeting this evening.

RepperPro is easy to use and has a variety of geometrical styles of seamless pattern that you can create. I sometimes like to do this with my artwork as it’s just another way of creating pretty art. Sometimes, the patterns/shapes that form inspire me for other art. Of course, if I choose to save the seamless tile, I can adjust colours and play with the patterns in it to create new tiles for seamless patterns if I choose to do so.

I’m absolutely sure it’s possible to create patterns like this in other ways, with pen and paper. I’ve tried to do so in the past, but my brain just doesn’t seem to understand the process. Software that does this for me is brilliant and a bit of fun for sure!

Don’t know what I’ll do with these patterns. Maybe use some of them for products in my Vida and Zippi shops – both of which need a serious overhaul and update.

Repeating patterns 20 September 2018

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Angela Porter Seamless Tiles 20 September 2018 small

The other day I had a bit of fun with a program called Repper Pro. It allows you to easily make tiles from any image you have saved on your computer. These tiles can then be turned into tiled patterns which are seamless.

I used just two of my latest abstract botanicals and after less than an hour I had saved over 100 tiles to my hard drive! You can see some of my favourite ones above.

Some of these tiles were made from tiles I’d created rather than the original artwork.

I would love to see some of these as patterns for cushions or framed pictures in canvas work or cross stitch. I also think they’d make beautiful fronts for greetings cards or note cards just as they are. In fact, some of the patterns I prefer as single tiles rather than as repeating tiled patterns.

Here are just four of these as tiled patterns. I think they’re lovely, and I’m amazed how easy it is to use the Repper software and how my artwork can be used in this way too.

I’m not sure if they’d make wonderful fabric, they could be too busy for lots of applications, but then this is all personal preference for sure.

Angela Porter Repeating pattern 20 September 2018 04

Angela Porter Repeating pattern 20 September 2018 03

Angela Porter Repeating pattern 20 September 2018 02

Angela Porter Repeating pattern 20 September 2018 01

Today’s clutch of repeated patterns.

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Having more fun in between more ‘serious’ work, not that any of my arty times are ‘serious’, they’re all fun!  I’m so lucky to make a business out of  something that is always pure contentment to do – create art.

#createdonsurface

#autodesksketchbook

Repeating pattern

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Tile11 onelayer Angela Porter small and watermarked

Oh, I’m having so much fun creating repeating patterns!  There is something inside me that loves geometry and symmetry and messing around with dimension, and it gives me a bit of a creative break from the contract work I have at the moment.  Not that I’m not enjoying that, ‘cos I am, but sometimes it’s nice to do something a bit different.

I used one of my entangled drawings of late with the Repper program, GiMP and Autodesk Sketchbook Pro along with my Microsoft Surface Book and Surface Pen to create this.

The colours came from this months color palette challenge over on the Angela Porter’s Coloring Book Fans facebook group, though I added the teal green into the palette.

Repeating patterns, my first experiment

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Pattern 18 coloured v01 watermarked

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about and looking at how to make repeating patterns.

I’ve tried the old fashioned way of working on paper and cutting the paper and so on, and not found the results at all satisfactory.

I’ve had a bit of a go in Adobe Illustrator, but I find Illustrator so confusing and frustrating to use.  There seems to be a total disconnect between my brain and the software architecture of Illustrator, and other similar pieces of software.

A day or two ago I found a little app in the Microsoft Store called Amaziograph that lets me create repeating patterns in sheet form, which is great if I want a sheet of black and white repeating, entangled line art, but not what I want if I want a coloured repeating pattern.  Oh, the app is a lot of fun to mess around with for sure and no doubt I will use it to generate patterns.

Looking around at software today, a lot of it either works in Illustrator or is prohibitively expensive given that I just want to have a play, see what I can come up with and see if it’s something that I’d like to spend more time with.  Where they offer free trials, I know they’re not going to be a long enough trial for me to get to grips with Illustrator and the software/plugins, so I’d not be able to make my mind up.

So, on a wander around the corners of Google, I found a lovely little program called Repper. It had an online trial version that I could play with quite happily, and I decided to purchase it afterwards.

In Repper, you open your own artwork and use parts of it to create repeating patterns.  The pattern above is an example of that, kind of.

What I did was to take one of my coloured mandala patterns and use that to create a pattern that was pleasing to me.  Actually, I had many, many patterns that were pleasing to me, and I saved them as tiles that would form a repeating pattern.  With some, I saved them as a surface pattern, where the tiles were already repeated.

What is nice is that the program lets me set both the size and quality of the tile or surface image.

Next, I put the  tile I particularly liked into GiMP (GNU image Manipulation Program, open source software) to copy the black lines and create a new, uncoloured tile with a transparent background.

Autodesk Sketchbook Pro was my next destination so that I could colour the tile as I liked.  Not so easy where the edges of the tiles will meet  and to have no edges showing up.

The tile is partly finished in terms of colour, but I wanted to see how it would look tiled.  Go, back to GiMP I went and the above was the result!

My head now hurts a little after this, which means I need more tea, LOTS more tea and a bit of a break.

I absolutely love that I can take my artwork and use it to create more interesting designs and patterns with.  It’s absolutely fascinating, very easy to get lost in it all.

Definitely a very nice way to spend a few hours on a chilly and very rainy afternoon!  My Surface Book and Surface Pen have had a good workout in the process too!