Tropical leaf pattern generator

Big leaves and bright flowers. Choose monstera, palm, banana, hibiscus or a Hawaiian mix, how many leaves fit across the tile and how rich each is, and export a seamless pattern as SVG, PNG or CSS.

Open in the generator How it works

Dark green monstera leaves with deep slits on a cream ground, in rows that are shifted half a leaf

Leaves as wallpaper

Large tropical leaves have been a decorating staple since the nineteenth century, when greenhouses and botanical books made them fashionable in Europe, and again since the 1930s, when Hawaiian shirts, barkcloth and later the aloha print put palms, monstera and hibiscus on cotton and rayon. The monstera has leaves with deep slits and holes, the banana a long blade ribbed with parallel veins, the palm a frond of narrow leaflets on a curved rib, and the hibiscus a flower of five wide petals with a long stamen.

Ornamatic draws general versions of these plants. They are not botanical illustrations or copies of any particular print.

How the generator builds them

Each plant is a few shapes. The monstera is a heart-shaped blade with wedge slits cut from the rim to the midrib and, in richer versions, two holes. The palm is a row of pointed leaflets that shorten toward the tip, the banana an ellipse with a midrib, parallel veins and two torn notches, the hibiscus five petals with veins and a stamen. The Hawaiian mix lays monstera, palm and flowers in turn.

The leaves sit on a grid with a whole number of cells per repeat, every other row shifted by half a cell, and each is turned by its own angle, so the tile repeats without a seam. The variation setting turns the leaves differently.