Mexican folk pattern generator

Birds, paper flags and layered cloth. Choose Otomi embroidery, papel picado or a Guna mola, how many cells fit across the tile, how rich each is and how thick the lines, and export a seamless pattern as SVG, PNG or CSS.

Open in the generator How it works

Red and green birds with fanned tails alternating with red flowers on stems, on a cream ground

Three crafts of Mexico and Panama

Otomi embroidery, known from the town of Tenango in Hidalgo, covers white cotton with animals, birds and plants stitched in one or two strong colors, with flowers and leaves filling the gaps. Papel picado is tissue paper cut with chisels into banners that hang on strings at festivals, above all at the Day of the Dead. The Guna people of Panama make molas, the panels of their women’s blouses, by reverse appliqué: several layers of colored cloth are stacked, and each is cut away to show the one beneath, which leaves nested outlines and thin bands of color.

Ornamatic draws general versions of these crafts. They are not copies of any one embroidery, banner or mola.

How the generator builds them

Otomi is a field of birds with fanned tails and wings, alternating with flowers on stems with leaves. Papel picado is rows of flags on strings with a scalloped lower edge, each with a hole punched in the middle, along the top and in the corners. A mola is a square cell with a diamond, octagon or cross repeated at smaller and smaller sizes in alternating colors, with thin cuts between the layers and short fill-in dashes.

The cells sit on a grid with a whole number of cells per repeat, so the tile repeats exactly. Richness adds more dots, cut-outs, layers or dashes.