seamless patterns for backgrounds

Why not? They will work very nicely, there is a huge selection to be found online and you can even make them yourself with special softwares and photoshop plugins.

First off, let us start with a few of the pattern libraries you can find online:



http://www.indrikov.com/pattern_violina/pattern_violina.html



http://www.squidfingers.com/patterns/10/



http://www.brusheezy.com/patterns (also lots of psd brushes)

http://www.deviantart.com/?order=9&q=patterns (of course!)



http://patterns.ava7.com/



http://pattern8.com/



http://www.noqta.it/dromoscopio/

And if you still cannot find what you are looking for, then you may also want to try your hand at making your own. Imagelys gives out a free photoshop plugin which makes seamless patterns, which you can download from here. I have not personally tried this, however I have an idea that for it to work at its best you may want to download the texture packs on the page as well and start off from those.

Richard Rosenmann (who has a great collection of free photoshop plugins by the way) has a seamless texture generator plugin called Tiler for photoshop.  Again, I have not tried this out myself, but you can download it from here (scroll all the way down the page): http://www.richardrosenman.com/software/downloads/

 (Tip:  Some of Richard Rosenmann's other plugins (such as 'Halftone', 'Pixelate', 'Scanlines' and even 'Ascii Art' also do a great job of creating seamless textures. Try them out for sure!  :-) 

And then there are of course the really nice ones, however they do have a price tag attached: Pattern Studio is one. And then there is a really great one called Mystica which is actually a software for generating textures for 3D. And then finally Genetica, is another a 3D texture software which can be used to generate seamless textures.

And then, if you want to go even further you can make a seamless background image by following the steps in this earlier tutorial here. Only difference would be that you should preferably use a square format rather than a rectangle and also that you pick an image (or crop a part of an image) which will look nice as a pattern The rest is very much the same: Flip, blend, merge, flip again, etc. And sometimes use a layer mask and sometimes not, depending on how things look... And remember that the strangest things can give you a result: Below I am linking a seamless image which I made out of an old master painting. So, basically use your imagination and experiment...

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