Digital Motif Design

1Motifs: a quick reminder

A motif is one small design that is repeated to make a pattern. Motifs can be geometric (lines, triangles, diamonds, zigzags), plant (leaves, flowers), animal (birds, a cow's horns) or abstract (swirls and shapes that are not real things).

2Ideas from imigongo

Imigongo is an art from eastern Rwanda. Traditionally, women mixed cow dung with ash, shaped it into raised patterns on a wall or board, let it dry hard, and painted it. The motifs are geometric: diamonds inside diamonds, zigzags, triangles and spirals. The traditional colours are black, white and red, sometimes with grey. These bold shapes are perfect for a computer, because a drawing program is very good at straight lines and exact copies.

3Design a diamond motif, step by step

1. Turn on the grid. Open the View menu and look for Grid. If your program has Snap to grid, turn it on too: your shapes will jump neatly to the grid lines.
2. Draw a square. Use the rectangle tool and hold Shift (in Inkscape, Ctrl) while you drag.
3. Rotate it 45 degrees, half of a right angle, to make a diamond. In LibreOffice Draw, right-click the square, choose Position and Size and type 45 as the rotation angle. In Inkscape, use Object, then Transform, then Rotate. In Paint, which cannot turn shapes like this, draw the diamond with the diamond shape or the polygon tool instead.
4. Copy, shrink and colour. Press Ctrl and C, then Ctrl and V, to paste a copy. Hold Shift (in Inkscape, Ctrl) and drag a corner handle to make it smaller without changing its shape. Move it to the middle and give it a new colour. Repeat to make three or four diamonds, one inside the other: white, black, red, white.
5. Add a background. Draw a black square behind the diamonds. If it covers them, use Arrange, then Send to Back (in Inkscape: Object, then Lower to Bottom).
6. Group it. Select all the parts (Ctrl and A) and choose Group (look in the Shape or Object menu). Now the motif moves and copies as one piece. Paint has no Group: use the select tool to draw a box round the whole motif instead.
7. Save it as motif- and your name.

Try your own ideas too: a zigzag band, a triangle cut in half by colour, or a small spiral. Keep the motif simple, with no more than four colours.

4No computer? Design it on paper

1. On squared paper, draw a square 4 cm by 4 cm.
2. Mark the middle of each side and join the four marks with a ruler. That is your diamond.
3. Draw smaller diamonds inside it, each one about half a centimetre in from the last.
4. Colour with charcoal (black), chalk or white clay (white) and red soil or a red crayon.
5. Cut out a copy on card to use as a template in the next lesson.

5Look closely

This cloth was made more than 100 years ago by the Kuba people in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda's neighbour. It is woven from raffia palm fibre and embroidered by hand.

• Find a diamond inside a diamond. Does it remind you of imigongo?
• Find a zigzag line. How many points does it have?
• The maker did not repeat each motif exactly. How is this different from a motif copied on a computer?

Try it yourself

Try each one first, then tap Show answer to check.