There are many different types of background tiles out there. One type that is frequently seen looks very much like flowing silk or satin, with soft rinkles and bunched areas. These tutorial will show you how to create such a background from scratch, in any color you desire. You can create the silk look with nothing but the tools found in PSP 7, but if you want to create a seamless tile, you will need the two filters PatternEditDo and PatternEditUndo, created by Dennis Crombie. You can download them at Dennis' website.   You'll find them in the set called DCspecial3.  You might want to take the time to download the rest of the DCspecial sets, there are some very interesting effects in there. Make sure that you install the DCspecial3 filter set before starting this tutorial. If you're not sure how to install plugins, check out this tutorial at New Dawn Micro.

Start by opening a new file (File > New) with 16 million colors and a white background. I started with a canvas that was 200 x 200 pixels, but you can make it larger or smaller depending on your needs. Set the foreground color to black and choose your Airbrush tool. Set the brush size to about 15, the Step to 1, the Opacity to 100, and the Density to 100. The other settings are flexible. A Hardness of 37 and a round brush shape were used here. Simply use the Airbrush to scribble some black lines on the canvas. Be sure to leave lots of white areas, however.

Now click on the Retouch tool. First, set the Retouch mode to Smudge. Now pick the round brush and set the size rather large (90-100 or so), the Hardness to 20, the Step to 1, and the Opacity and Density to 100. Drag the smudge tool across your image (back and forth at an angle works nicely) until you get a fairly smooth blending of grays.

Here's where we make the image tile seamlessly. First apply the PatternEditDo filter. You'll find it listed in the Effects > Plugins menu under DCspecial. The filter rearranges the four quadrants of the graphic and places the outer edges of the image against one another so that you can blend them to make the tile seamless. The result of applying PatternEditDo is shown below. The edges clearly don't match.

To blend the edges, use the Retouch/Smudge tool again. Use the same settings as before, and try to blend the edges together without geting too close to the border of the graphic window. with this tool very small movements can go a long way.

To make sure that your blending  didn't disturb other areas of the image, apply the PatternEditUndo filter. This reverses the effects of PatternEditDo. Obviously my blending created some problems. Again, use the Smudge tool to carefully blend the areas that don't match.

Repeat the PatternEdit Do / Smudge / PatternEditUndo / Smudge combination until you end up with a graphic that tiles seamlessly ( has no clear edges between quadrants.) My final blending result is shown below. Try to make sure that you still have some variation in your shading. If your blending results in a featureless gray blob, you'll need to start over.

Here's where we start turning the gray smudge pattern into Silk. Go to Effects > Artistic Effects > Chrome. Set Flaws to 1, Brightness to 0, and the Color to light gray (RGB 192/192/192.) be sure that the Use Original Color box is UNchecked.

Create a new Raster layer above your gray pattern. (Layers > New Raster Layer) Set the Blend mode to Multiply in the Layer Properties dialogue that pops up, and edge the opacity down to about 30. Now choose your Flood Fill tool (the paint can), and fill the new layer with the color of your choice.

The pattern needs just a bit more color to look good, so we're going to increase the Saturation. First merge all of your layers (Layers > Merge All .) Now go to Colors > Adjust > Hue/Saturation/Lightness. Set Hue and Lightness to 0, and the Saturation to about 37. The saturation level is flexible; just set it to whatever value gives you the result that you want. Below we see a finished blue tile.

If you don't like the color that you used, take your seamless tile and  try colorizing it

Any number of different patterns can be created with this technique, each one unique. Two more examples are shown below.