I'm not a fan of busy wallpaper on my iPhone and iPad home screen. It’s fine on the lock screen but when you’ve got a screen full of icons, a noisy background image gets in the way. So while I may have something fun in the lock screen, I generally keep things simple behind the home screen. Then I found this image of BB8 from Brazilian artist Jonathan Silva.

I started out with a cropped version for my lock screen but I wanted it to carry over into my home screen. For awhile I used a plain orange background cropped from the same image but that wasn’t BB8-ish enough for me. Then I tried using the actual image but had the exact problem described above. Specifically, I couldn’t find icons in it. So I decided to blur the image and it worked splendidly.

The idea occurred to me while I was holding my iPhone so I used Pixelmator as my weapon of choice. I already had the image in my photos library so I loaded it from there and selected the blur tool. The gallery at the bottom of this post walks you through the steps and the image below shows the final product. Now you may not be as enamored with a certain astromech droid as I am, but you may have child or a dog or even a bit of art worthy of the same treatment.