Here is the final image we will be creating:

Let us begin!

We are going to begin with the default settings in Blender, as you can see below.

Creating the Background

To create the background we are going to be adding a plane and then making a series of holes in it. This will then act as the basis for our entire background when we replicate the plane with two array modifiers and a mirror modifier.

Go ahead and:

• Add a plane from top view by hitting spacebar > Add > Mesh > Plane
• Subdivide that plane by hitting W > Subdivide Multi > 3 divisions

This will give us a grid that we can punch a few holes in with relative ease.

Next, go ahead and select the vertices shown below:

Then:

• Press x > Delete Faces to delete the selected faces
• Next select the inside edges of the upper-left hole by clicking on one of the edges with alt > RMB
• You may then hit e > esc to extrude and cancel the transform that extruding activates.
• Next you can hit cntrl + shift + s > 1 for the To Sphere command, this will modify the extruded vertices into a perfect circle.

Check out the result below:

From here we can duplicate this circle and the surrounding faces into place of all the other holes such that we have a mesh that will repeat without any gaps. Think of it as a tilable texture but in mesh form!

As you will surely notice, on the bottom left and bottom right you will only duplicate have of the circle.

After duplicating each piece and moving it into place it will be necessary to remove all the duplicate vertices:

• Select everything with a
• Press w > Remove Doubles

Moving on, before we can replicate our pattern we need to move it such that the bottom, left corner is at the center point of our grid. If you used the default size for the plane then you can simply select everything and hold down cntrl while moving it to lock it to the grid.

Now, for our final background we want the holes in our mesh to have some depth, to do this all we need to do is select each of the inner circles and extrude them down along the Z-axis as you can see in the image below:

Now is where things begin to get really fun! We are going to now add two array modifiers to replicate our pattern. The first array will repeat the pattern along the X-axis to the right, and the second array will replicate the pattern down along the Y-axis. We will then you a use mirror modifier along the X and Y axis to duplicate the whole pattern across the axis’.

• First go to the Editing Buttons and click on Add Modifier > Array
• Increase the count to 10
• Click Merge
• Add a second Array and change the count to 3
• Click Merge
• Change the X Offset to 0 and the Y Offset to 1.0

This will leave you with 1/4 of our final pattern. To complete it:

• Add a Mirror Modifier
• Click Y in addition to the default X, this will mirror it both up and across the central axis.
• Add a Subsurf modifier to smooth out the mesh
• Select everything with a and then press w > Set Smooth
• Setting the mesh to smooth will likely cause some normal issues (black spots) in which case you need to hit cntrl + n > Recalculate Normals while everything is selected.