Natural texture generator

Grown and forged

Some of the most loved patterns in decoration were not drawn at all. Wood grows in rings, and a plank cut along the trunk shows them as wavy lines with islands where a branch grew. Agate is silica that settled in layers inside a hollow rock, one thin band after another, and malachite is a copper mineral with the same habit in greens that grow darker and lighter in turn. Damascus steel is folded and forged so its layers appear as ripples when the blade is etched. Old glaze cracks into a net called craquelure as it cools, and the shell of a hawksbill turtle, once made into combs and spectacle frames, has amber plates with dark spots.

Ornamatic draws generic versions of these materials. They are not scans or copies of any piece.

How the generator builds them

Wood, agate, malachite and damascus are the level lines of a smooth noise that repeats on the tile: the bands are the strips between neighboring levels, colored in turn. Wood adds a steady climb of rings to the noise, damascus a gentle wave, and agate and malachite use the noise alone, so their rings close around islands. Craquelure and tortoiseshell are a Voronoi diagram on a torus, with narrow gaps for the cracks, or with rounded cells and a spot of a second color in each.

Both the noise and the diagram repeat exactly at the tile edge, so every material joins up without a seam. The variation setting picks a different pattern of the same kind.

What you can adjust

• Material — wood grain, agate, malachite, damascus steel, craquelure or tortoiseshell.
• Rings, Layers or Cells — how many bands or cells fit into one repeat.
• Variation — a different pattern of the same material.
• Colors — a ground and up to three more; any palette.

Export and use

Download the seamless tile as PNG or SVG, or copy a ready CSS background. The patterns you create are free to use, personally or commercially.