Abstract Tesselation

I'm pretty proud of this design:

Read on to see how I did it, or jump to the bottom for examples of what I've done with it.

I love drawing stark, high constract, swirling designs. I do it all the time, and I've enjoyed taking myself a bit more seriously as an artist by making these designs available for sale. But there is a limitation to using this style of art commercially: it doesn't scale or repeat well.

I can't just blow up one these drawing to print on a t-shirt. I draw small, so if I print it big it will look awful, even though I scanned it at high resolution. The lines will be jaggy, errors will be glaring, the space will feel empty, and it will look generally bad.

I could just print it small and tile the design... which looks even worse. It's just a grid of disconnected squiggles. It looks cheap and lazy because it is.

These problems are pretty bad on a t-shirt, and far worse on bigger items like blankets.

So I set out to draw one of my typical swirly patterns in a way that I could tile and print at any scale. I needed it to tesselate. The basic approach is simple, and there are plenty of good explanations available. Basically, I needed to work in a square, and any lines that went out one edge of the square would need to fit in from the opposite edge.

In theory, I could have done this all by hand and produced a perfectly aligned design. It might even be a fun experiment someday. But for actually trying to accomplish something, I'm just not that skilled. I have to draw in place, I can't visualize how things would fit together. So instead of drawing everything in the square, I kept going right on outside the bounds and reserved space on the opposite side. Graph paper helped a lot -- though in hindsight I realize I should have done this on a light table so I wouldn't have to digitally clean up the grid."

The hand-drawn original looks a little goofy, and I left a too much space in a few places which I had to populate digitally. But it works! Using the grid as a perfect guide, I digitally moved all my "outside the lines" lines back in through the other side of the square. The result perfectly lines up for tiling. Now I have something that looks good printed at a size close to the original, and that I can print on larger products by tiling.

I think it looks particularly good on clothes and bags. It's a dense, high contrast design that confuses the eye a bit.

The only remaining problem is that the design is really hard to convey in small pictures, especially computer-generated renders like RedBubble creates.

The original was black-and-white, but I wanted color too, and more shading. So I digitally shaded it and wrote some very simple software to swap the color palette. I can generate this pattern as hot pink shapes, outlined in turquoise, on a taupe background in about three seconds if I want. Which I don't.

I do, however, want some other intense color combinations. I don't know if anybody will ever buy one of these eyeball-searing patterns, but I like providing the option.