Stained glass and mosaic pattern generator

Small pieces of color held together by lead or grout. Choose leaded glass, quarry panes, Roman tesserae or Byzantine waves, how many pieces fit across the tile, how wide the lead is and how rich the colors, and export a seamless pattern as SVG, PNG or CSS.

Open in the generator How it works

Red, blue and yellow pieces of leaded glass of different shapes separated by thick black lines

Light and small stones

Stained glass is made of pieces of colored glass held in a frame of lead strips, the cames, which show as dark lines and give the picture its drawing. Plain diamond quarry panes with a few colored ones were a cheaper window in every medieval town. A mosaic is a picture made of small stones or glass cubes, the tesserae, set in plaster and separated by grout. The Romans laid them in straight rows for floors, and the Byzantine mosaicists tilted them to follow the contours of a face, a fold or a stream, so that the surface shimmers.

Ornamatic draws general versions of these crafts. They are not copies of a window or a floor.

How the generator builds them

The ground is the lead or the grout, and the pieces are colored polygons on top of it. Leaded glass is a Voronoi diagram, colored with three colors so that neighbors differ. Quarry panes are diamonds in a lattice with accent panes in a diagonal pattern. The Roman tesserae are small squares in rows, each slightly turned and of a slightly different size, colored by a smooth noise so that shades flow into one another. The Byzantine tesserae sit in rows along waves, each turned along the line.

Both the noise and the diagram repeat exactly at the tile edge, so the tile joins up without a seam. The width setting changes the lead or the grout.