May 2012 Tutorial - Create Seamless Patterns in Xara Designer Pro X

Thanks very much Gary for the Tile and your time, much appreciated. I have made to quick tiles to see the effect and they look really good so will do some more experimenting later :D

Thanks alot,
Stygg

Tea for Two and a candy/ice-cream/cupcake/lolly thingy

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Bit worried about how 'cute' some of mine are turning out :eek: ...............just to confirm I am a happy married man, I love Rugby and never dress up in my wifes clothes on Weekdays.

I like the tea time one, it reminds me of Wedgwood Jasperware.

Edit: In fact the jasperware idea inspired this :) I used the Celebrated Burgeon Ornaments TG font with some bevels to put together this tile. It was a bit fiddly I had to go in with the eraser to make the center where the two large burgeon glyphs overlaped and erase out some of the overlapping bits to make the center look better.

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@Frances: Nicely done, and nice to recycle the Burgeon set, eh? :)

@Antspants: Do not stop what you're doing simply because your patterns aren't all footballs and beer cans! If you're fluent in art styles that appeal to both women and men, then you're twice the creative individual that some profess to be!

This took a lot of time! Mapping out the shapes=90% of the time, using the Rounded Bevel preset took 10%.

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My Best,
Gary

Here's one that I didn't design to tile vertically; I copped the feeling of it from some of Alphons Mucha's work, Art Nouveau period in France:

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Here's the trick: set up your drawing so it tiles. Do 3 across and three from top to bottom if you need to. Then use the Bevel tool on all shapes. Then set up a background shape at the center of the composition, and clip to it. Doing this keeps the Bevel areas continuous as the pattern repeats.

My Best,

Gary

Both of those are really nice, that top one looks like it took a lot of patience as well as time!

Well, yes, Frances, it took perseverance, too, because these two are jigsaw puzzle pieces—there is no real "background to the elements.

Which gives me an idea; I'm going to do a seamless tiling jigsaw puzzle!

The more visually muted you make patterns, the more uses you might find for them, I'm discovering.

—Gary

That jigsaw puzzle sounds interesting.

One use for seamless tiles is digital scrapbooking Digi-scrappers call them papers but really they are just seamless tiles. I put together this seamless tile using a quick shape starburst pulled around with the quick shape tool until I got something I liked. I used warm earthy tones and I used my tile as a scrapbooking paper. I used the same quickshape and a plain rectangle with shadowing and some of the same colours from the tile to create a quick layout

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I think I'm very close to realizing a jigsaw puzzle seamless pattern, but me, I'm out of steam.
If anyone else would like to pick up my work and finish it, all power and credit to you!

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Happy Memorial Day, America!

Lift a glass to those we've lost,

Gary

Microkaleidoscope uses two tagged colors, both at the start of the color line in the document, so you can make this two tone design any two colors you like.

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The above is just a composite to show how the two colors can be changed to make a continuous design, just with modulated colors.

My Best,

Gary

Seamless wheels - the tile, and applied to a disc

If you like it, feel free to use it...;)

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Couldn't resist the challenge - started from scratch though.

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Christine

@guyke—thanks! I'm doing a final sorting through next week!

@Christine—Your design is a LOT better than mine!

Good concept though, eh? :)

My Best,

Gary

I like that Guyke, did a similar one myself :D

Stygg

Interesting details, Stygg, e.g. the small patterns on the rim of the larger circles. Like it!

Here's another underplayed one:

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Here are a couple of simple ones made with the auto-tiler.

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Phil

Phil, I just had a play wtih these, and they are way cool!

I'm going to have to do a write-up on Xara Xone on exactly how to use these, and modify them...I'll cull the text from your in-document text.

My Best,

Gary

Here's another offering - just made with one square and 9 circles. The brush applied does the rest.


Christine

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That's really pretty I like the soft feathery look.

Thanks Gary! I realise they're not artistically very good but I hope people find the ideas useful.

Here are a few tips that I've found while using the auto-tiler:
* You only need three layers at most for any design. The layers are only there to ensure the overlaps between shapes at the edges of the tile are correct and so if you arrange all your bottom left overlaps to be on Layer 1 and top right overlaps on Layer 2 it will work. Shapes in the middle of the tile can be on either layer. Layer 0 is for a simple repeating background. (When shapes don't overlap you don't even need three layers.)
* When you're starting a new design use "Open live copy" to open the live copies and delete the contents and use outline mode so that you can see the background square and avoid deleting it.
* It doesn't matter exactly where you position your shapes when you're using "Open live copy" to start a design. Just put something rough down in roughly the right place and then you can do the fine editing in the main document using select-inside, where you can see the tiling.
* Avoid obvious square repeating by using the square backround shape only as a guide, don't join things along the edges of the square. You can use snapping in the main document to join parts of one tile to the next.
* You can safely change the pixel size of the final tile by altering the dpi in Create Bitmap Copy. It seems that any size tiles OK but it's probably best to stick to simple factors of 96 dpi. So 48dpi will give you a 256*256 tile, for example.

Phil

Here's one more from me. I painted the flower using the shapebuilder then grouped it and gave it a simple circular transparency. Arranged on a pale lavender background.

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Thanks SO much for this tutorial!! I've been on a quest to find the best way to make perfect repeats and it fell into my lap today. You rock!
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You're quite welcome, and I'm happy to see that a member can put the steps to use in the embroidery field!

@Stygg—

Here's a layer of grime you can add to your tiles. It's seamless, and sort of clumpish.

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My Best,

Gary

I'm going to experiment with your clumpy noise Gary, I think it might be just dandy for using as a fill with the shape builder and a semi transparent stroke to actually paint on grungey stains. Thanks :)

Here is my experiment, it worked quite well. What I did after creating my basic parchment paper was to import the clumpy noise tile and I adjusted the contrast and brightness a bit to give my stains a bit more defintion, then I used the colour erase/select tool to remove most of the lighter colour and I made a bitmap copy. Next I drew a stroke with the shape builder ( no need to worry about settings for this stroke but a large nib will give you a nice big shape to work with) and I filled this stoke with the new bit map copy. Then I made sure nothing was selected and went to the transparency tool and set a transparency around 65 - 70%. Finally I went back to the shape builder selected a large nib and set the softness fairly high and because the last stroke was filled with the bitmap the shape builder continues to fill each stroke with this fill until you change it. Note: you must have GNOMRA enabled for this to work. You can make sure no strokes are selected and go back to the transparency tool and set it to a lower setting and add a few darker stains if you wish.

What I would really like is to be able to set the transparency for the shape builder from the SB info bar, and the same for the eraser.


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Thanks for the clumpy noise Gary, Francis found good use for it right away, good effect.

Stygg

Just to prove that they don't have to be square.

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Christine

These noise layers are getting to be tiles of their own! I thought I'd offer something that's noisy, but also has an organic appearance to it. Put it on top of your design at partial opacity, Stained Glass blending mode might work well.

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My Best,

Gary

This was approximately the linoleum tile pattern ni our kitchen when we forst bought our house.

A quick trip to Home Depot and a hundred bucks and an exhausting afternoon corrected this grievous sin against aesthetics.

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My Best,

Gary

Gare,

Your welcome to use anything I post on TG.

Christine

An off-topic suggetion and discussion about how Xara should adopt Illustrator's tiling creation features and methods has been moved to Dear Xara http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthre...-Tiles-in-Xara

Just a reminder, if you want to make a suggestion to the Xara Group about how you think Xara products should work or what features they should adopt, please make those suggestions in the Dear Xara forum where they most likely to be heard and considered.

A completely different tile using the noise and clump tile. I hope no one finds this offensive or inappropriate but I was asked to make this by a friend and thought I would show it. If anyone objects to this tile then please remove it Gary.

Stygg

Initially...I saw absolutely nothing blatantly offensive, but now that you've qualified your post, Stygg, you have me looking harder than I should at your piece.

Nope. sorry! It looks like an ancient parchment or something with primitive glyphs on it.

Is it supposed to be sexy or racist?

:)

-g-

Shrouded in mystery ;))

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Drwyd

Shrouded in mystery ;))

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Cheers guys, absolutely shrouded in mystery is correct, but thought I best check or put in some proviso's because it is so easy to annoy people than it is to please them now a days I find.

Stygg

Very nicely done Stygg.

Shrouded in mystery is very clever! :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by stygg2003

... it is so easy to annoy people than it is to please them now a days I find. Stygg

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You find that?

You're hanging out with the wrong crowd, Stygg! Park yourself right here. tg has the most open-minded, positive, and tolerant tone of most of the forums in cyber-space.

We have a much lower honest-member-to-jerk/troll ratio, IMO.

Nice tile, in any event. What you did manages to look, overall, most like pixel-based in nature than vector.

Salut,

Gare

I know what you mean stygg, I'm a little gun-shy about that kind of thing too. For instance I posted a blend that I thought looked like an eagle or falcon but to others it looked completely different. Ah well!

Actually if you look close at Stygg's attachment and think about Drwyd's response you will see it's something very famous!