Art Nouveau and Baroque pattern generator

Curves that grow like plants. Choose an acanthus scroll, Baroque volutes, whiplash curves or a Glasgow rose, how many fit across the tile, how rich each is and how thick the line, and export a seamless pattern as SVG, PNG or CSS.

Open in the generator How it works

Gold volutes with a fan palmette on a stem and small butterflies, in rows on a navy ground

Two ages of curves

The Baroque of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries covered walls, frames and silver with acanthus, the toothed leaf that the Greeks had already put on their columns, and with scrolls that wind into volutes. Around 1900 Art Nouveau took the curve back from the plants themselves. The Czech artist Alphonse Mucha drew women in frames of flowing, whiplash lines, and in Glasgow Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald set a stylized rose against tall, straight stems.

Ornamatic draws general versions in the spirit of these styles. They are not copies of any particular work.

How the generator builds them

The acanthus scroll winds a stem into a spiral that ends in a berry, with fans of three leaves along it. The volutes are two spirals that face away from each other, joined by an S-curve and crowned by a palmette. The whiplash curve is a bundle of parallel wavy lines with a six-petal flower between them. The Glasgow rose is a set of offset circles in two shades, between tall stems with small buds and a pair of leaves.

The motifs sit on a grid with a whole number of cells per repeat, and every other row is shifted by half a cell, so the tile joins up without a seam. Richness adds leaves, petals or strands.