Slavic folk ornament generator

Four Russian and Slavic crafts. Choose Khokhloma, Gzhel, a Pavlovo Posad shawl or a cross-stitched rushnik, how many motifs fit across the tile, how rich each is and how bold the line, and export a seamless pattern as SVG, PNG or CSS.

Open in the generator How it works

Gold spiral stems ending in red berries, with gold leaves and tufts of grass, on a black ground in the manner of Khokhloma

Four crafts

Khokhloma is painted wood from villages on the Volga: gold curls, berries and blades of grass on red or black, glowing because the wood is coated with tin or silver powder and baked in oil varnish. Gzhel is porcelain from a village near Moscow, painted in cobalt blue on white, with flowers whose petals are shaded from a thin outline to a pale wash. The shawls of Pavlovo Posad are printed with large cabbage roses, dark leaves and a border, and are still worn across Russia. A rushnik is a ritual embroidered towel; its bands of crosses, rhombuses and fir branches are stitched in red, and sometimes black, on white linen, with a pattern that differs from region to region and from Russia to Ukraine and Belarus.

Ornamatic draws general versions in the spirit of these crafts. They are not copies of a particular workshop or towel.

How the generator builds them

Khokhloma is a curl that rises from a stem and winds into a berry, with leaves along it and grass below, alternating rows turned the other way. Gzhel alternates a six-petal flower, drawn with an outline and a lighter fill, with a sprig of paired leaves. The Pavlovo rose is a set of offset circles in two shades, so that it looks like a spiral of petals, with green leaves around it and a bud beside. The rushnik is a bitmap of crossed stitches: a hooked rhombus, fir trees, a zigzag and rows of small crosses.

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 and petals, or switches the towel from a plain band to a full one.