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.
This was my very first gocco print! I used the ink blocking material to print the eyes and the body at the same time.
I printed a total of eight. Four on yellow paper, four on blue.
I drew the image with the pen that came with the gocco machine, and although it works well to burn the screen, I didn’t love the feel of drawing with it. It ate up the paper and left little bits of it behind, like the the markers I used when I was little. I hear micron pens work great, which is awesome for me since I use them all the time. I’ll be using those for the next print I make.
It was a whole lot of fun, and I look forward to doing more.
I drew this pattern in illustrator from a sketch I did. I printed it out (I tiled it because it was bigger than 8.5×11) then taped the print out onto a nice piece of paper with double sided tape.
The double sided tape said that it was “removable” but, it still ended up tearing up the surface of the paper. Next time I’ll make the tape less sticky by sticking it down on my skin, like the inside of my arm (I’m sure it sounds weird, but it works to make any tape less tacky, but still sticky enough to stick to most surfaces) and pulling it back up before sticking it to the good paper. Also, I’ll tape it a little further away from the edge of the image area, so that I could just crop it out if need be.
Once the printout was taped to the good paper, it was just a lot of patience and an xacto knife, cutting around the edges of each part of the pattern.
I changed blades halfway through and a new blade made all the difference (I think the one I started with was already a bit dull); I would start with a new blade at the beginning when I do it again.
Probably not practical if you wanted a lot of multiples of the same thing, but if you need a lot of them, you can do really detailed cutouts with laser cutting–it’s weird because it kind of burns the back of the piece of paper, but the detail far exceeds what you can do with die-cutting.
