In response to the recent camo designs of users: My take
ONLY READ IF YOU ARE A CAMO AUTIST!!!
OTHERWISE YOU WILL BE BORED TO DEATH!!!
I took a good evenly lit Belgian Jigsaw picture and recoloured it. I tried making a woodland summer pattern that could also work in early spring and early autumn, covering most of the year. Without being too tan to not work during full-green summer but also not totally absent of tan (like M84 and the alike) so it still works when some of the grass dies from the dryness on hot episodes in summer.
I live in Germany btw. A part with beech and oak, no pine.
Just recolouring the green parts to green was not green enough. Since the brown parts of the pattern took up more space than the green ones, I reset everything and recoloured the brown parts to green. Still not green enough. So I ended up just kind of freestyle recolouring green and yellow blotches to green and I ended up with a nicely asymmetrical distribution of colours.
I then recoloured the yellow parts to tan and the brown parts to a less reddish brown. The pattern undoubtedly looked cartoonish. I thought of the way dead leaves look on my nature walks and instantly knew what was off. The tan needed variety. So I made some tan blotches darker and some lighter so it looked like real dead fallen leaves. Much better.
Then I realised the pattern was not disruptive enough and seemed very 2D. So I added more black lines in the style of the WW2 German "Leibermuster" which I consider to be the most disruptive pattern to exist. Those wavy lines with those spikes sticking out were drawn by me. It made the pattern drastically more disruptive and made it look a bit less 2D.
Still too 2D looking, it would stick out from close-up, even if it colour-blended perfectly. The big perfectly solid blotches look so incredibly unnatural. So I tried using a texture brush in my program to add some texture and roughen things up.
What I realised is, what would really help would be this kind of micro-pixel thing that EMR has got going on. EMR has these tiny pixels that are scattered all over the pattern in an asymmetrical fashion that gives the pattern a texture, has a bit of a confusing effect, adds depth and makes it look far less 2d and the rough edges of the pixels have a good eye-irritating effect too in my opinion.
I am not glazing EMR, I am just outlining the good aspects of the pixel micro pattern texture.
So next up I will definitely get a pixel-art software and start creating digital patterns. My inspirations will be the Flecktarn families, Belgian Jigsaw, Leibermuster, US4CES, SS Oakleaf/Leto/Medusa, Phantomleaf Wasp I series
I wonder how many camo autists are in this sub