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.
