Messing around with triangular pixel effects and came up with this wallpaper. Thought I would share. Has a nice mix of detail and simplicity. 1920x1080px.

Tutorial coming soon. Let me know if you want it at any other sizes.

While I’ve been happily using it, I wanted something with a bit more colour, but still with the natural wood. I stumbled across this colourful wallpaper, which turned out to be “Catch the Beat” by StaredownStudios, and wanted to combine the colours with the wood.

This is what I came up with:

Download

1600×1200

1280×1024

1280×800

1920×1200

Update

On some computers I prefer the colours to be at the top rather than the bottom. So I made a flipped version. I think i prefer it to the original in some ways.

Flipped version: 1600×1200

Flipped version: 1280×1024

Flipped version: 1280×800

Flipped version: 1920×1200

Any other size requests?

Update 2

Following a request from LOSTman, I’ve done a few iPhone versions of the wallpaper.

1. Colour Wood iPhone

2. Colour Wood iPhone – flipped

3. Colour Wood iPhone – alternative

Any requests, let me know in the comments. Here’s the list so far:

Pirate Windows wallpaper

Pirate Apple wallpaper

Pirate Ubuntu wallpaper

Pirate Windows – rusted edition wallpaper

Destroy Ubuntu wallpaper

Template file

I installed Ubuntu eee last night on to my little Asus Eee PC 701. It’s a very well put together package and I really like the Netbook Remix interface. I’ve had a few little glitches so far, but over all it’s really impressive.

The background wallpaper takes on a bit more significance than normal with this Netbook Remix interface. With the whole thing semi-transparent, the colours are defined by the background you have. I liked the default red/yellow/green wallpaper but once the interface is over the top of it, the yellow is all but invisible, leaving a murky red and green background.

So I have quickly made up a few alternative coloured versions. The blue one is seen in the screenshot above.

All credit goes to the original artist: Soft. Also more Ubuntu eee wallpapers can be found here.

If you do, I’d be interested in seeing what you come up with, so let me know in the comments.

P.S.

If you just want the plain skull and crossbones wallpaper as seen above (maybe you don’t have Photoshop or don’t want to download the file), here it is, 1920x1600px:

I’m not really sure why you’d need to pirate Ubuntu since it’s free, but I still think it looks good.

Version 1

Available sizes:
1920x1200px (widescreen)
1600x1200px
1280x1024px

Version 2

Linear gradient background

Available sizes:
1920x1200px (widescreen)
1600x1200px
1280x1024px

Version 3

No crossbones

Available sizes:
1920x1200px (widescreen)
1600x1200px
1280x1024px

Version 4

No crossbones, linear gradient background

Available sizes:
1920x1200px (widescreen)
1600x1200px
1280x1024px

This turned out to be closer to 10 minutes but I was enjoying it. Made using brushes and coloured using a Gradient Map adjustment layer. Size is 1600x1200px.

And a darker version.

Download the PSD file (4mb)

Download Blue version:
1024x768px
1280x1024px
1600x1200px
1280x800px (widescreen)
1920x1200px (widescreen)

Download Black version:
1024x768px
1280x1024px
1600x1200px
1280x800px (widescreen)
1920x1200px (widescreen)

Download the template

I’ve always loved these simple pattern wallpapers. They’re the only type I can stand for very long, other than a plain, solid colour.

So, I made this little template for you to make your own. Click the icon above to get a ZIP file containing the Photoshop PSD.

The PSD will open very small. This is to keep the file size down. It’s annoying on sites like deviantart when people make a wallpaper, then have it in a thousand variations of colour and every possible resolution in one ZIP file, making the download 50mb or something ridiculous.

So with this template, you can resize the image yourself to what ever size you like. It’s built with adjustment layers, so it won’t pixelate or blur. You can choose your own pattern or change the colour very easily.

The only down-side is that you need Photoshop to be able to do all this… so if you don’t have Photoshop and want it at a different size, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

Pattern resources

Original pattern from 5qm.de, where you can find more patterns.

The Inspiration Gallery has some great old style patterns.

Deviantart also has a good Photoshop Pattern Resources section where you can download patterns already as Photoshop Pattern files.

I was on /wg/ today and someone had posted a desktop screenshot, asking for the original wallpaper. At first glance, it just looked like a basic, pixelated image, but upon closer inspection, the pixels had rounded edges and a slight sharpening effect. The pixels were also on an angle, something not possible with the standard mosaic filter.

I looked at it for a while, wondering how it had been done, assuming it must have been a filter or maybe a script in GIMP. Since I had the original, unpixelated version, I thought I’d have a go at recreating the wallpaper for the person that had requested it.

The first thing I noticed was the angle of the pixels. I opened the screenshot in Photoshop and used the Ruler tool (I) to measure the angle. It was about 25 degrees.

I opened the original, unpixelated wallpaper and got started. Out of habit, I duplicated the layer (Alt+L+D) and took note of the image size (because we’ll be cropping it back to this size, later). This particular image is 2560×1024 px (dual screen wallpaper).

The first step is to rotate the image -25 degrees to get the angled pixels. To do this, I went to Image > Rotate Canvas > Arbitrary (Alt+I+E+A) and entered -25 (Clockwise).

Now to add the pixel effect, I went to Filter > Pixelate > Mosaic. A value of 40 looked similar to the requested version.

After that, I needed to rotate the image back to it’s original level and crop the edges. To cancel the original rotation, I went back to arbitrary rotate and entered 25 (not minus) to get it straight. Then, I went to Image > Canvas Size (Ctrl+Alt+C) to crop it back to the original dimensions – 2560×1024 – which I entered into the boxes.

The final step was the add the rounded/sharpened effect. I was stumped. Having come this far, though, I decided to experiment with some filters to see if I could get anything similar. I started looking through the filters and to my surprise, Paint Daubs worked perfectly. I had the settings of Brush Size: 8, Sharpness 4 and Brush Type: Simple.

In the image below you can see before the Paint Daubs effect and after.

And that completes the effect. I’ve grown to quite like it. It’s close to the requested one, but not exact. I have no idea who made the original, but I’d love to know how they did it.

Download the final wallpaper above.