HOW TO: tiled 'the Gimp'- wallpaper

[ubu-lemon]

i have made a tutorial to make 'tiled' wallpaper in the Gimp,
it is rather detailed, starting with opening a file and so,
i think i don't need to comment it much, cause the images show a lot, but maybe if people would be interested i could do so of course ...

(tiled wallpaper is like a pavement, it is a little square or rectangle that is repeated several times like real wallpaper actually. the thing is that it needs to 'match', so i show you here in this tutorial what filter is used for it, and a few examples)

here is my own 'tiled' wallpaper
hope to see yours too






step 1: create a new file, don't do a too big size, cause it is going to be tiled, it can be square too.
you could also start from an existing file and cut a nice part out of it, textures might be cool, like water, textile, wood, fruits, etc



step 2; so i started from a new file, and have put some lines on it, no effort at all, change colour



step 3: change shape of brush



step 4: until you get something like this for example:



step 5: choose a nice filter for your 'artistic creation' , as you can see i chose 'sobel' here (in my own wallpaper i have chosen 'lava')
you can experiment it a little, maybe use more filters on the same image, or if you start from a cool image already maybe no filter is necessary.



is continued in the message right after this one (cause 1 message can't contain more than 8 images )

[ubu-lemon]

step 6: this is the most important step, cause you make your tile 'match' (itself actually)
you do that with this filter, as you can see it will do some overlapping, if you don't want this, try to avoid
too much lines in the corner then, observe a little how the filter works and you'll be able to make it match even better.
sometimes the overlapping is cool too.



step 7: this would be the result of our example, now you can save the image(don't forget where you save it), as jpg, or as png or as gif, no need for a high dpi, 72 is ok,
since it's only viewed on screen.



step 8: now the only thing you need to do is put it as wallpaper of course... so browse for your image...



step 9: don't forget to set it to 'tiled'



step 10: ready !!



here some more examples i did, if you want more, just ask ... (me obsessed by tiled patterns ? what makes you think so ... )

[Bruce M.]

HEY! Neat stuff ... going to try one ... or 2.

Bruce

[lespaul_rentals]

Pretty cool, man.

You might want to put "HOWTO:" in the subject line.

[p_quarles]

Pretty cool, man.

You might want to put "HOWTO:" in the subject line.

Done.

P.S. Hope that's all right with the OP.

[dmn_clown]

step 6: this is the most important step, cause you make your tile 'match' (itself actually)
you do that with this filter, as you can see it will do some overlapping, if you don't want this, try to avoid
too much lines in the corner then, observe a little how the filter works and you'll be able to make it match even better.
sometimes the overlapping is cool too.

This is only one way of making an image seamless, another way is with all layers merged press ctrl + shift + o to bring up the offset menu and bring the edges to the middle of the image (e.g. for a 512x512 image you offset 256 in the x and 256 in the y) then you can choose between the healing brush (gimp >= 2.4), blur tool, or the clone tool to "fix the seams", when finished ctrl + shift + o again and offset the edges back to where they belong.

It's a little more work but often give better results. 8)

[SpiderGorilla]

That is awesome. There's not enough love and appreciation of the old tiles images. Nobody I know uses them anymore. I use them sometimes, but I prefer them for websites. I currently use a flat black image that has my logo emblazoned on it.