Systems and methods for computerized drawing of ornamental designs consisting of placed instances of simple shapes. The shapes, called elements, are selected from a small library of templates. The elements are deformed to flow along a direction field interpolated from user-supplied strokes, giving a sense of visual flow to the final composition, and constrained to lie within a container region. In an implementation, a vector field is computed based on user strokes. Streamlines that conform to the vector field are constructed, and an element is placed over each streamline. The shape of the elements may be modified such as by bending, stretching or enlarging to reduce spacing between elements and to minimize variations in spacing to improve aesthetic appearance.