For a college art class, we were given the assignment to play with tiling and repeating patterns.

Pretty much everyone did the assignment without giving it much thought: they made sure the left edge would match the right edge, and the top edge would match the bottom edge.

Bleehh, have some imagination! I made sure the edges would match if they were mirrored in either direction. It took a bit of extra planning, but this allowed me to create so much more complexity with my patterns.

The final version was made with spray paint and acrylic paint. I started by photoshopping the pattern and printing stencils. Then I painted each layer on the board. For the edges, I made a series of "fringe" stencils to make the white lines look like they're bleeding out. I stenciled the edges in semi-random order, just kind of going with the flow and fitting each one where I thought it looked best. Sometimes the stencils wouldn't line up perfectly, so I touched up the edges with a brush & paint.

Below you can see the final product, and below that a step-by-step graphic explaining the process I chose to tile the pattern.