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| Painter has a nice feature that can be used to create freehand seamless web tiles. Any brush can be used to create these tiles. [Painter does need to be upgraded to 6.03 or better to use the new grad and pattern ink brushes. Without the upgrade, these brushes do not wrap around a drawing surface.] | ||
  It's
a fairly simple process to create a drawing web tile. As a starting point,
create a new blank file, 150x150 pixels. Go to the Select Menu and pick
All (or use CTRL-a). This obviously selects the whole image and the
"marching ants" surround the file. |
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 Go
to the Art Materials Palette, the Pattern section
and click on the Pattern section menu (the triangle at the far right of the
section). Click on the Define Pattern line. This will turn the blank
square into a seamless tile. Draw on it and the line will go from one edge
to the other. |
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 There's
a lot of different techniques that can be used. A brush can be used
on its own in a freehand fashion. This one is a simple example. A tan Felt
Pen Marker was scribbled over a light ochre background. A webpage
background using this tile is here. |
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  This
pattern uses a rainbow gradient mixed with the Distorto variant of the
Liquid brushes. Using a diagonal stroke helps to get rid of the square
appearance that a lot of homemade seamless backgrounds have. While there
is clearly a repeated pattern, there's no seam to give away what the
original image looked like. A webpage with this tile is here. |
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 This
pattern has a similar technique to the rainbow one. A light blue Digital
Airbrush was stroked over a blue background. The Turbulence Liquid brush
variant blended the colors together to present a smoke appearance. The
webpage sample is the background on this page. |
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 This
nebula look was gotten by painting with the Glow variant of the F/X
brushes. By painting with large circular strokes that extended outside of
the 150x150 pixel frame, it was possible to present an illusion that a
much larger tile was used. A sample webpage is here.
One note is that this, and a number of other F/X brushes, do not create
seamless patterns. They appear to as brush strokes go from one edge of the
image to another, but seams remain when tiled. The Smear brush variant of
the Liquid brushes helped blend the edges. These are only a few examples of what can be done using drawing techniques to create seamless tiles. More examples are below. |
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Blue Pencil |
Bristle Spray (Impasto) |
Fiber (Impasto) |
Felt Pen |
Leaky Pen |
Grad Pen |
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