So I have been trying to draw some tileset that maybe difficult to achieve otherwise, to enable artistic control and to create variations in a tileset.
When each tile can connect to any adjacent tile in all four directions, you’re no longer drawing isolated squares. We are working with a system of relationships. One tile might need to blend seamlessly not just with its direct neighbour, but with several possible alternatives. Take the template below: tile 13 can connect to 14 on its right, but it also needs to work with 0, 3, or 5. That means the drawing that crosses tile boundaries has to line up in multiple ways, not just one.
A 16 piece tileset template
This is where drawing tiles directly often breaks down. I am constantly zooming in and out, checking edges, flipping between layers, or mentally tracking all the possible adjacency combinations. It slows down creativity, and it makes variation e.g. stylistic experiments, hand-drawn touches, subtle perturbations difficult to achieve consistently.
Starting With a Seamless Pattern
To get around this, I began experimenting with a workflow that feels much more natural: Start with a seamless pattern first, then turn it into tiles.
- I opened draw.tile.graphics and created a simple seamless pattern. Nothing too elaborate, just something with structure and flow.
- Then, I dragged that image directly into auto.tile.graphics.
- The app immediately asks whether you want to load into separate tiles. Clicking OK means the tool repeats the image 16 times to fill the full tile canvas.
Imported seamless pattern sketch as a guide
Because the pattern is already seamless, repeating it creates a perfect visual guide of where things will wrap. Now, instead of staring at blank tiles and worrying about edge alignment, I’m looking at a continuous world. I can draw across tile boundaries, trace the logic of the pattern, and sculpt the details in context.
It’s like drawing directly on wallpaper instead of cutting squares first and hoping they match later.
This approach gives me:
1. A global view of the system
Instead of thinking tile-by-tile, I’m thinking in flows, rhythms, and shapes across the entire grid. I can create sweeping lines, organic transitions, and repeating motifs naturally.
2. A built-in guide for adjacency
Since the pattern repeats seamlessly across all 16 tile positions, every tile edge is already correctly aligned with every other tile that shares that edge type. This dramatically reduces the number of alignment checks.
3. Freedom to experiment
Want variation tiles? Want to push the style? You start from a coherent base and introduce divergence where needed.
4. Artistic control first, logic second
Instead of designing tiles as abstract rules, I start with the artwork I want, and let the tools help me break it into logical pieces.
A tileset drawn with a 16-piece (15+1 empty) tileset template.
The Tile System Becomes a Canvas
What I’ve realised is that a tileset editor becomes less intimidating when it stops being a grid of constraints and instead becomes a canvas of possibilities. By starting with a seamless pattern, I bypass the technical heaviness and focus on gesture, texture, and directionality.
Once the pattern is laid down, I can create a new layer and draw over it, erase unneeded parts, add variations, emphasis highlights while keeping the underlying relationships intact.
Two Practical Use Cases
First, I took the tiles created from the seamless starter pattern and recombined them back into a new seamless pattern. Because each tile is already designed to blend in multiple directions, recombining them becomes a playful, almost collage-like process. Pieces can be shuffled to generate new large-scale textures, alternative variations, or entirely different moods.
An example of the recombined seamless pattern with the drawn tileset
Second, I tried using the tileset in a way following how one would have used it for autotiling in a game engine, and the results were immediately usable: transitions looked natural, edge cases handled themselves, and the hand-drawn qualities survived procedural placement.
Ready to try and draw your own tileset?