It’s so nice to share with your friends! Sometimes when I am drawing, when in need, I use part of an area within my unit shapes, for use inside another cell. It helps to solve design issues of space. The images below illustrate this concept.

Sharing heads like in the grocer and the shopper. The shopper shares its eyes with its mirror counterpart. The mirror passes right through the middle of the eyes. The forehead is the shared part, as it functions both as the nose/mouth/chin area. Looks a little off, but it still works.

Sharing a head three ways, a new one for me today, in Heel to Heel and Head to Head. Took a while to figure this one out. Minimalism works best, one single dot. repeated by rotation, works as both eyes and nose. One small curve, works as both the mouth and the eyebrows. And by pure luck, the chin beard repeats twice to frame a bald spot!

p6 shared face

An area that shares itself between two figures.
Sometimes for the same purpose as all of the above.

Sometimes for a different purpose
Like in the gun in hand and gun in the mouth. Accidental Suicide. Really? A highly interactive tessellation.

Or
Sharing eyes and faces like in the Inuit and the White Explorer. The Inuit’s face, surrounded by a fur hood, and mirrored above, acts as the Explorer’s goggles.

My nephew calls some of these humans “unibrows”!
Moustache acting as eyebrows and beard acting as hair. Just slightly weird in the image below. He boxes for ABBA!

Lots of software out there to help you accomplish this type of design.

An iPad app is available, which is what I have used here to create these images: KaleidoPaint by Jeff Weeks.

There is also a java-based program “Escher Web Sketch”  at the Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne. Make sure Java is enabled and not blocked by your security software.

Also, another screen-based software by Anselm Levskaya Escher Sketch v2. (I used to have a basic Mac-based software, way back in prehistory, 1995, by the same name. It worked on the cutesy first Mac)

Or a pair of scissors and a piece of cardboard works quite well. That’s how I learned.

Comments are always welcome!