Karl Wilcox
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Drawing Crazy Patterns

Drawing Crazy Patterns

Jun 03, 2020

Standing outside
Like a joker on a hill
He's drawing crazy patterns
With his shoes

One of the hallmarks of well-structured code is that it can be easily modified or re-used, sometimes in completely unexpected ways.

We have already seen DrawShield re-purposed to create flags and Warhammer Pauldrons, but a recent correspondence with Alex inspired me to look at fabric patterns. After all, a heraldic "Treatment" is the application of named colours to a repeating pattern, and that is a good description of many fabrics.

Hence, a suprisingly short amount of time later, we now find DrawShield able to draw the following fabric patterns: - buffalo check, gingham, glen check (or Prince of Wales check), graph check, houndstooth and shepherd check.

We can use these anywhere that we can use a heraldic treatment (most often as the field). Now, these patterns are obviously in no way heraldic, but they do look nice, and if I were suddenly appointed "Earl of Picnic" then surely I would want "Gingham azure and argent a plate charged with a cheese wedge orange above a breadloaf brunatre" as my arms?

Flushed with my fabric success I moved on tartan...

Tartan, it turns out, is rather more complex and we have to move away a little from standard heraldry. Tartan is defined by a series of colours followed by thread counts and so we expand DrawShield to do the same, e.g.

tartan ancient black 4 scarlet 24 ancient black 24 yellow 4

Note that using the tartan pattern automatically enables a whole bunch of new colours, specially used in tartan design.

We can also add new shapes to contain our drawings, so let's add something that looks a bit like a sample of material, known as a "swatch". And lets add a new visual effect that makes our drawing look a bit like fabric. Both of these things are easily done (well structured code, remember?) Add all of this together and we get the following:

Which I think is quite impressive for a program never intended to be used this way!

You can find pictures of all the new patterns here, and full instructions and other useful information in the user guide.

If you have suggestions for other fabric patterns then please get in touch. After all that hard work, I need a coffee...

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