How do I make a seamless gravel pattern but with different objects?

Question

I'm trying is to make is a design from four cupcakes that overlap and are seamless just like a seamless gravel pattern basically.

I've added a picture below to show what I want to create.

Now you may ask: Why do you want to make something you already got and still have access to?

Well, the pattern is made by the Printify editor and, as it turned out, Printify does only have one fabricator for this object which is in the USA. I want to sell my object in my home country I got to pay about 25% import tax. So therefore I would like to know how I can make this exact or even better pattern myself so I can use it on an EU PoD site.

What I tried to do is download it from them, but there is no button for that nor can I screenshot or download it from F12 dev tools as the slipper outlines will be in it. One solution I've got is to screenshot it and edit out all outlines but that will take a while and will be my last resource. All PoD sites I've seen have a very basic designer which lets you do nothing good so I've to import my own pattern to that site in order to get my US and EU customers the same designs.

I don't own any editors for images besides GIMP or Paint.

How can I make such a pattern?

Answer 1

As an array of repeating items it's not difficult. There seems to be a few different shapes which resemble faces. Using faces is clever, because we (humans) spot effectively "it's a face". This would not work as well if only abstract shapes were used.

The construction idea:

If you follow my yellow parallel lines you see that different face shapes are uniform lines along them. You see that along the horizontal (cyan) line there's also some approximate repeating, but that's a random incident, the tilting angle (about 20,4 degrees) of the actual shape lines is not selected so that there's an exact easy to see horizontal repeating interval.

To simulate the effect we can draw a tightly packed set of 4 different shapes. They are ellipses. They have (like faces) vertical symmetry axis which make them look like they stand straight:

In the left the ellipses stand straight. In the right each of them is rotated clockwise 20 degrees. They will be straight again when the shape lines are tilted.

In the next image the the tilted shapes are grouped and the group is repeated horizontally with regular interval. Partial overlap makes it look tight:

The result is repeated again, but verically and again there's so tight repeating interval that no big caps occur:

Finally the result is rotated the same 20 degrees, but counterclockwise. The shapes stand straight again:

A rectangular piece of it looks complex, but somehow it still looks like it's tiled in a regular way:

It is regular, you saw it's formation rule above. It would look even more regular if there were easy to see horizontal repeating interval, too. The tilting angle should have tangent which is a simple rational number like 2/3. That's angle=22.4 degrees. The used 20 degrees is a little off.

Like already said by others, making this is easy in a vector drawing program. More: There it's elementary. There are the tools to make easily regular repeats and straight lines of shapes and shape groups. In addition the result is a vector, which stays sharp in all sizes.

Answer 2

I'm disregarding all the commentary on ownership and production. It's not really relevant to the problem. It's assumed you own the artwork and have the rights to reproduce it.

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To recreate any pattern, the key is to find the repeats.

This pattern is not overly complex in its repeats. It appears to be a straight rectangle brick repeat.

Essentially, you find the repeat, then recreate that.

Edges here are not perfectly exact - off by a couple pixels - and there's that foot shadow throwing in odd shading/lines... but this is the pattern generated by repeating the solid section above...

I don't think anyone here will recreate this for you, and quite honestly GIMP may not be the easiest tool to use. Using a vector editor, such as InkScape (which is free) would generally be easier in my opinion.

Answer 3

The following is for GIMP

1. Create a square document, say 500px x 500px

2. On a new layer, paste a rendered cupcake image (with transparent background) and resize it smaller than the square, select it using Ctrl+A and copy it Ctrl+C. Then delete this layer.

3. In the Brushes panel choose the Clipboard Image brush

4. In Windows > Dockable Dialogs > Symmetry Painting, choose the Tiling option

5. Set the X and Y intervals in the Symmetry Painting dialog to 500px (or as close as you can get, sometimes it will only get up to 499.88, but that's fine).

6. Paint copies of the cupcake with the brush, Tiling will be automatic.

7. Choose a new foreground colour, Paintbrush tool, and in the tool options set the Paintbrush mode to LChHue or LChColor - and paint on the design with a soft edged round brush. Repeat for different colours

8. If you need to, you can do Layer > Transform > Offset to reposition the tile to make recolouring easier.

Here's a rough example. I'm sure with more time and care you could probably make a better job of this.

9. Do File > Export As, and save as a .pat file in your patterns directory (You can find its location in Edit > Preferences > Folders), and refresh the Patterns dialog, locate the pattern you made.

10. Now create a new document any size you want, and click and drag the pattern onto the canvas.

The finished pattern fill

Answer 4

Okay so I did make a 250x250 canvas imported this cupcake layer (picture 1) Then I copied the layer and hide the original layer. I made the copy Layer to image size and did ofset x90 y30 and did this for about 8 layers untill i got this (picture 2)

This is what I want. I guess I have to cut the cupcakes to make them seperate and place them diagonaly above each other to get rid of this line of cupcake bottoms cus that doesnt look wright.