Here is my first experiment with a paper collection. I struggle so much with choosing colors. Ugh. But I love playing with shapes and sizes and layouts.

Now that my pattern arraying is down pat, I looked into making my own shape, to be original and also help move the process along.  Plus now I can call up the shape at any time.  I just made a shape with the pen tool and saved it as a custom shape.  I’m starting to feel like I understand this silly program more (although Inkscape is much more intuitive).

I saw some fun multicolored dots and just had to figure out the pattern there.  It was pretty simple and at first I thought it wasn’t going to work but the pattern block has a total area of two dots for each color, even though some are cut up more than others.  I used the mellon ball surprise palette from colourlovers.  I’m so glad they are around so that I don’t have to sit around all day coming up with color combinations when other people can do it for me.  I just love the fun pile of dots in this one.

Although I enjoy the intricacy of the ornate gates and borders the simplicity of these crowns is also very appealing to me. What is also really great about these patterns is that just a small (relatively) image can be uploaded and repeated as a tile and background color can be coded instead of changed in photoshop every time. Hopefully I’m not channeling the 90’s too much with this tiling.

Dots!!  Dots are simple.  But who doesn’t want a dot lying around.  I especially like extra transparent dots that blend right in with the background color.  This was my first experiment into figuring out how to array items for patterning.  Now that my brain has found out how to place and match up a pattern like this making more will be a breeze.

Jacob and I have been thinking about sharing some of my patterns with the world in a website.  In trying to come up with something fun for the name “Beeswaxer”.  We’ll see how it goes but that it has inspired me a bit to make this honeycomb of a background:

My journey through seamless patterns has definitely been a learning experience. I’m so excite to share a little about what I have learned in this little series.

This next background I did get the image from The Graphics Fairy.  The original image was from an 1895 hardware catalog:

I think that is just so cool.  Not exactly the kind of door you could find at Walmart, eh? I love the design but no doubt a hand-drawn image is never a seamless pattern from the beginning.  Jacob showed me how to straighten a picture, which was crucial for the side bars to be exactly up and down.  I used the ruler tool to pick a point at the top of the picture and at the bottom of the picture that I wanted to be aligned, for instance the right side of one of the vertical bars in the image.  Then Image>Image Rotation>Arbitrary will line up those points.  I had to do a lot of hand editing on this one.  The realignment left holes on either side of the pattern and the top didn’t match up well to the bottom but I added some extra bars and hand drew the bands with the pencil tool.  I put a lot of time into it but it is probably my favorite background I’ve made, out of like the six or so I’ve made so far.

As I uploaded this I realized how Orvis-y the tan background color made this pattern look. This image came from the wonderful graphics fairy. I cleaned it up and arranged it to make a calm pattern. This is the pattern I used for my sister‘s blog.

In the current redesign of my blog as well as my sisters, I’ve been figuring out how to make new original backgrounds. I can’t wait to share them all with you. I’ve just been so intrigued with how to make seamless tiles that aren’t lame. Jacob is thinking of making a website for some of them so that you can give them your own colors and download the tile 😀 That would be awesome.

The Graphics Fairy is a great place for images in the public domain.  I’m totally inspired by some of the patterns I see in the graphics found there.  I clean up the images and give them a transparent background.  But the hard part is lining them up to be repeats.  The final image is totally worth it though.  Enjoy!