I'm always looking for something for background tiles behind tables on web pages and tiles to use for flood filling text.  I stumbled across this in desperation one night while trying to make something different for text and just happened to have a couple tiles that blended beautifully!

The tiles you start with for the blending need to be seamless before blending so I use a lot of DeskChecking on the tiles.  The tutorial for DeskChecking is another tutorial I've written for checking tiling.

Sometimes trying for a new idea requires filters to mangle the tiles I have - I use filters that tile and there are a lot of them out there!

Formulas:
I take two seamless tiles and blend them into a new one.  But I like change the original tiles to get more distance out of them.
In this first Blenda-Tile, I took two tiles I don't care for and ran each of them through tiling filters.  Any filter that tiles will work.  On this first one I used filters from FunHouse.  Tiles number 1 & 2 are what I started with;  tiles 3 & 4 are the filtered tiles that I will blend.

Step 1
I used tile 4 for the base, so I activated tile 3 and using the 'Layers Palette' (if you don't see your 'Layers Palette', hit the 'L' on your keyboard) to drag the tile layer onto tile 4 - as you drag it, it starts out with a circle with a slash through it;  this means 'You can't do this, Idiot!' - but as you get the cursor over the other tile, the cursor changes to a square with a cursor in it.  The emblems are to the lower right of the cursor itself.  When you see the square with the plus sign, you can drop the layer onto the image.  Now, tile 4 has 2 layers and the tile 3 layer is on top.

Step 2
Next, you activate layer 4 and using the 'Layers Palette', you  lower the layer opacity of the top layer.  As you slide the controller to the left, you will see the top layer begin to become sheer and you can see the bottom layer through it.  There is absolutely no special setting to use - every set of tiles you blend will call for it's own combination of transparency on the top layer.  Let your eyes be your guide on this part.

Step 3
DeskChecking should be done to ensure that the two tiles blended created a seamless tile, but if you use the DeskChecking on the first two tiles after running them through a filter, you can almost be guaranteed success.  Got it!  And that's all there is to it, but I am going to show you two more Blenda-Tiles and how they turned out for me and the text filled with the Blenda-Tile.

This completes the tutorial.
 
 

2nd Sample

3rd Sample

This technique and a little imagination will take you a long way!

Close Window when Finished.

tutorials by CSGreen