Lots and lots of my doodles are one-offs, odd little scribbles that come from who-knows-where. They make me laugh in the moment, but may not resonate with anybody else’s particular interests. I’m not going to lie—some of these end up as my favorite doodles, because they come from a corner of my brain that is exploring something I didn’t expect.
Other doodles fall under “variations on a theme.” I have steadily amassed a collection of dog and cat doodles (I shared some examples in a previous post), and I have a good number about gardening.
I also doodle a lot about work life and the home office. I think of those as “writing what you know.”
Occasionally I get obsessed with an oddball topic for only a short time. When this happens, I’m left with a small collection of similar doodles that I don’t expect to expand on. That was the case with dinosaurs: I spent a brief period testing a theory that I could create other dinos with as much personality as my T-Rex.
The theory was a bust, but it did occur to me that the dinos were more fun grouped together than they were individually (excepting good ol’ T-Rex, of course, for whom I will always have a soft spot). With this in mind, I made a few tileable designs.
Methods for making tileable patterns vary, depending on which software/app you are using. I’m pretty comfortable working within the Adobe suite, but generally I doodle while curled up in a chair with my tablet, using the Procreate app. I made my very first tiles by creating an image in Procreate, exporting the image, and then noodling with it in Photoshop. I didn’t really enjoy this process; not because it didn’t work (it works really well!), but because I shifted into Work Brain as soon as I sat at my desk. For me, that is not what doodling is about. My process for making dino tiles, therefore, was just to lay out images within Procreate on a simple square canvas and hope for a pleasing result. Trial and error taught me to use a lot of white space when making a tile this way, otherwise the eye is drawn to the very obvious edges of that bounding square.
Recently I was playing with my “Swordplay” series of silly knights, wishing I could use them to make a pattern that avoided feeling, well, square. Googling for ways to do this within Procreate uncovered a really helpful approach.
The basic idea here is to start with an initial image you like, and then chop it into precise quarters (the designer sells a Procreate template to help with that part, because it can be finicky). Once quartered, you flip each section of your image top to bottom, and also side to side. This distributes the center seams to the four edges of the canvas, so that that they reconnect accurately when tiled. Genius! Because this method leaves some blank space in the center, you need to spend a little time completing the composition at the end.
I decided to give this approach a shot with my knights. I began by arranging my four existing doodles onto a single square canvas.
Using the template, I selected each quarter in turn, and flipped them upside down and side-to-side.
The result (when viewed right-side-up) is a tileable image. Still, the significant space that appeared in the middle just called out for another doodle…which I didn’t have. So I doodled another few knights—doing the limbo!—and was very pleased with the result.
The only thing left was to add a background color. I chose orange.
Tiles like this are fun for device lockscreens/wallpapers as well as actual wallpaper. I’m planning to use a knight tile to create wallpaper for our downstairs bathroom (true story! the swatch is en route). This is the only room that the family is likely to let me wallpaper with orange doodles.
I don’t think any of us could take the dinos.
Process Peek: Tiling Tricks