anika mari

I’ve visited this site now and again over the years and have browsed through and drooled over the patterns in their pixel patterns gallery. Now that I’ve been taken up by the spirit of pattern making, I decided to try out making a pixel pattern of my own.

I opened a new little (25 px square) photoshop document, and arbitrarily filled in individual squares with the pencil tool, taking care to keep symmetry along the diagonal.

When I was done I copied and pasted the 25px square image into a new 50px square photoshop document, copied the layer 3 times and rotated and placed each to finish the pattern motif.

When the motif is viewed full size, the pixels tend to blend together a little bit for softer look.

The real fun came when I put the pattern together. I selected the motif and defined it as a pattern, then opened a new photoshop document 550px x 600px, and filled it with my new pattern.

View it full size here.

For a quick variation I added a pink background.

Full size here.

I have an idea for how to translate my other pattern designs into pixel patterns which I’ll try out next.  I’m not sure how or if it will work, but even this first try was a fun quick way to make a pattern.

The process reminded me of making paper snowflakes.  Folding up a plain white square of paper, arbitrarily cutting little bits and pieces of various shapes away, then unfolding the holey paper to reveal the final creation.  Whenever I cut away pieces for a paper snowflake, I imagine how it might look when it’s unfolded.  My brain doesn’t work that way though, so I’m invariably surprised by the final result.

Same thing happened with this pixel pattern.  When I arbitrarily filled in the little squares on the canvas, I thought I had a vague idea of what it would look like, but discovered that it’s hard for me to picture the final result accurately when all I see are squares.

I’ll have to try it again and see what other designs I’d come with.  It would be cool if I could eventually have a little more control about what the final pattern would look like as I’m making it.

I’ve been working on my Wood Blocks project little by little and have made some notable progress from my last post.  I started again by burning in the lines that I’d copied onto the blocks with graphic transfer paper.

It took a while, but I eventually finished all the blocks.

With all the lines burned in, I didn’t have anymore time to stall about deciding how I would color in the positive space. I wanted the finished piece to have contrast of dark and light, and I also wanted it to be a neutral color palette, but I wasn’t satisfied with the results of the oil pastels and believe that trying to paint them would get to messy and drive me crazy. I tested out how the wood burner would color in wider areas of color if I used the side of the tool instead of the tip.

I liked the result, but I wasn’t sure how the wood burner would perform on the painted surface of the blocks, so I tried that out next on one of the old test blocks.

It worked pretty well, and I found it interesting that the paint wasn’t burned away but somehow stayed translucent over the burned surface. You can clearly see the effect by viewing the large version of this photo.

I had a little steam left after settling on burning in the positive areas, so I tried it on one of the proper blocks.

I messed up a little bit once, so there’s a spot outside the lines that’s burned, but I’ll try to fix it with some sand paper. That’s as far as I’ve gotten, and honestly I finished to that point a few weeks ago. I’ve been busy, and then I went to the beach. I’ll continue burning the rest of the blocks soon.

I found an awesome little tutorial over at Design*Sponge that finally demystified how to create a tiled repeat pattern that’s not just a simple geometric, but that’s seamlessly intertwined.

I couldn’t wait to try it out, so I made a little pattern of my own. I didn’t want to make a full sized 8.5×11 tile, so I cut out a little square and started from there. The finished tile is about 3″ x 3″ though not exactly square.

This process does the trick! I wasn’t worried about being as carefully exact as mentioned in the tutorial since I wasn’t intending to create a finished product. The final tiled pattern isn’t perfect. In fact it’s rather crooked, but it’s close enough for my first experiment.

I find the results thrilling, at least in the potential they show for this technique.

I went to the rancho with the family and there was a good amount of down time, so I started sketching. I’d been admiring the wrought iron work that serve as bars for a lot of windows in Mexico.

A lot prettier than plain iron bars, so I decided to sketch them. At first I copied the different patterns that I saw, but I started to experiment with the same basic shapes and curves all the designs are composed of, but I switched them up from the basic patterns.

Here are the first few sketches I did while at the ranch:

Here are my own variations inspired by the originals:

I liked what I’d come up with, so I decided to take the idea bit further and work with color on a larger piece of paper.

For this image I used brown and red stabilo markers only:

For the blue version of the following pattern, I liked the blue and green, but the lighter stabilo marker that I used for some of the fine lines tends to get lost.  I decided to do another version. For the second version of this pattern I used black for all the fine lines and tried out a few different colors. I used both stabilo and Prisma Color markers:

With the last version, I was satisfied with the overall result and considered this pattern done, at least in sketch book form.

Here’s the sketch of the original pattern I’m using:

I settled on the shade of white I like–3 coats of the “white wash” I made, but you can still clearly see the wood grain since the white is not opaque. It’s a bit difficult to see the difference in this photo, but I chose the color of the block on the right, which was the lightest version of the 3 test blocks:

I tested out wood burning to create the lines of the pattern. I like the result, but when I first started I wasn’t sure if it was going to work. It took a long time for the wood burner to heat up all the way. I tried to make my first mark with the wood burner after it was plugged in for just a minute or so. It barely made a dent. I gave it another 10 minutes before I tried it again. The results were better, but not great. It seemed that the sharp metal tip was gouging into the soft wood without much actual burning. I fiddled with it for a while, going over the same lines several times and drawing with it very slowly, hoping that I just needed to get the hang of it. After maybe another 10 minutes, the metal tip was finally fully heated and was making nice smooth dark lines. I still had to practice and get the feel of it, but a wood burner definitely works best when it’s fully hot.

Here’s a photo of me waiting for the wood burner to heat up:

I tried out some oil pastels between the wood burned lines. While I like the effect, I’m not sure I love color for this project. Instead, I’m going to keep the color palette neutral. I have a few ideas to try tomorrow involving browns grays and black. Here are the test blocks I did:

**notice the wood burned lines!

Since I settled on the background color and wood burning, the next step was to paint all the blocks and then transfer the pattern.

This image gives you an idea about how I got the pattern on the wood blocks using graphite transfer paper:

Here’s a photo of the whole pattern transferred onto the blocks:

Tomorrow I’ll be burning in all the lines, and hopefully settling on an idea for how to color the positive space.