Texture Maker

This program makes amazing seamless textures which you can use in your web pages, scrapbook backgrounds, printed textiles and so on. The great thing abou it is that you can start very quickly and easily with a few mouse clicks and then get as deep as you want in order to choose the forms and colors of your design. A free demo is available for immediate download here.

Here are some example seamless texture tiles:

The above seamless texture tiles are very restricted in their color range, but Gliftex lets you choose whatever colors you want. For example the image on the right below is very colorful.

Below is a screenshot of the design program. (Don't worry about the old style title bar, Gliftex is fully XP, Vista and Windows 7 compatible, but I prefer to have the screen area dedicated more to my programs than the distracting ornamentation of the default XP and Vista GUI. So I set the GUI to Windows Standard)

To get your first image all you have to do is click on the create icon: . This will give you your first texture image, probably something you do not like. That's fine, all you have to do now is click on again until you begin to see something that you like. Then you can begin to experiment in a fine tuned way with the seamless tile texture image.

Lets have a closer look at that design panel:

This is a closeup of the panel you can see to the left of the screenshot above. The "Newton Drawing" icon will generate a new image where the basic underlying form of the texture is changed. The "Prism and Spectrum" icon (also conected with Newton!) will generate new versions of the seamless tile, but with different color schemes. The "Kandinsky style" icon is the hardest to explain, but basically it experiments with the detailed aspects of the image. This icon: (at the top of the program window) is the tickle command. It is not as drastic as the icon and does gentler overall experiments with your tile.

At the botto of this page are some tutorials which explain how to really fine tune the designs which the Gliftex texture program makes, but before that lets look at some more example images:

By the way, the images don't have to be tileable, that is up to you, as illustrated by the screenshot of the software below:

So you can in fact use the image design software Gliftex to create unique decorations for your documents and craft creations. As an example click on the leafy image below and see how the same image (made with this software of course) has been used as a separator in the page on "allover pattern making":

A free demo is available and the home version costs only $29.95.

Sue Chastain's review of Gliftex on About.com

Rose Window Design Examples

How to create floral rose window designs.

How to create floral designs.

Ditsie and calico designs

Mandala Designs

Seamless Paisley Drawing