At first blush, argyle seems like a really complicated pattern — especially if you’re looking at one with a lot of different colors in it.  But it’s really a very simple pattern if you know how to break it down.  This tutorial will show you how to draw a basic argyle pattern, so you can use it in your journal, your planner, etc.

The Basics

Argyle is built from a series of diamonds — usually elongated ones.  If you can freehand these fairly tidily, you can do that.  If not, dot paper can provide a guide.  That’s what I’ve used here.  (Although you’ll see in my second-step image that the dots actually threw me off a little.  If you’re concerned about that, you might draw lightly with a regular pencil first and then go over it with your colored drawing tool.)

To start, draw a row of diamonds.  They should touch at their left- and right-most points.  (See below.)

Continue the pattern, by drawing another row of diamonds immediately below.  These should touch at their points, as well.  (You can keep going for as much space as you need to fill, but I’ve just done two, to show you.)

It’s starting to look a little crazy here, because a third row of diamonds automatically appears between the two you drew intentionally.  That will clear up with this next step, though.  Color in the diamonds you drew (on purpose).

Much clearer again, right?  Now for the part that makes this into argyle — we’re going to draw a second set of diamonds over top of these, but they will be outlines only, and offset from the first set.  So what you want to do is draw a diamond exactly in between the first two.

Now, again, continue this pattern all the way across the row.

And repeat on the row below.

Now, you can see in the photo above that I’ve extended one row further than the other.  I did this for illustrative purposes.  How far you carry your rows across will depend on what your purpose is.  If you are looking to fill up a space you can just keep going as far as you want to the left and the right, even if they overlap funny.  (You could also choose to draw half an orange diamond there.)

If I were going to draw this just for the sake of pattern, I would probably stop where I stopped on the second row, for both.

It totally depend on the effect you’re going for.

Once you’ve mastered this, you can make it more complex by playing with color.  Sometimes the diamond which here are “blank” (that row that made itself) will be a contrasting color.  So, for instance, we could have had what is similar to an orange-and-blue checkerboard pattern — and then drawn the green outlined diamonds over that.

Or sometimes what we show here as the solid diamonds are a variety of colors.  The columns of diamonds might alternate colors.  Or they might even be a variety of colors.  The outlines could be dotted lines if you wanted.  There are a lot of ways to change it up, but the basic drawing process is exactly the same.  Even the most complex argyle patterns are really a matter of playing with color — look closely at them and see if you can break them down.