Mud cloth pattern generator

Marks painted by hand in bands. Choose how many bands run down the tile, how steady the hand is and how heavy the line, and export a seamless mud cloth pattern as SVG, PNG or CSS.

Open in the generator How it works

Bands of dark hand-drawn zigzags, crosses and triangles on a tan ground in a mud cloth pattern

Painted with mud

Mud cloth is a hand-painted cotton cloth from Mali, known as bògòlanfini in the Bamana language, where the name refers to cloth made with mud. The cotton is woven in narrow strips, sewn together and painted with fermented mud, which darkens the cloth where it is applied. Bands of simple marks run across it, and every mark can carry a meaning for those who make and wear it.

The marks are simple, and the charm lies in their repetition by hand: no two zigzags or crosses are quite the same, and lines drift a little off true.

How the generator builds them

Ornamatic divides the tile into bands of different heights and gives every band one kind of mark: zigzags, crosses, dots, ladders, triangles, chains of diamonds, waves or dashes. A whole number of marks fits across the tile, so the pattern repeats exactly. The bands are divided by double lines or by one thick line.

Each point of every mark is moved a little at random, and the dividing lines sway, to imitate the painter’s hand. A second ink can be given to some of the bands.