Sometimes just a quick tessellation exercise is required to limber up the creative force. A favourite one is Louis Cubes. This pattern was created with KaleidoPaint and Pixelmator, both, great apps on a tablet.

App 1 — KaleidoPaint

Within kaleidoPaint, I chose to use symmetry group P3, three different rotation points arranged in a hexagon grid. Only two vectors were required to accomplish this sketch, more or less linking the three rotation points. If you want a very rigid structure, use straight lines, or in this case, compound curves, just to make it spongy. I avoided linking directly to the rotation points of the grid, in order to lob-off the corners of the cube.

Once satisfied with your two lines, use the bottom right export options, and save a tile of your drawing, « save tileable rectangle » it will show up in the photos app.

App 2 — Pixelmator

The next step is to open the tile image in Pixelmator. It took me a few years of playing around with different photo/drawing apps on the iPad, to find one that filled all of my needs. I thought that one of the mini Photoshop apps would be the best one out there because that is what I use on the desktop computer, for my PowerPoint design work. No such luck, Photoshop on the iPad was close to useless. I also tried Procreate, it was unnecessarily complicated for my needs. Next, I tried Sketchbook Pro. Didn’t find it easy enough. I’ve settled with Pixelmator for over a year now and totally recommend it as the best for adding colours and textures to my tessellations.

The trick in painting a tessellation’s tile, is to make sure the edges, when linked in an expanse, are not apparent. Using layers, selecting areas, shifting areas to be painted, testing edges, painting, shading, adding textures are all possible using Pixelmator.

Below, is the final image, reduced in size for the web, as the high resolution tiles was a whopping 3812 x 2201 pixels. Adequate though for a beautiful print size of it was an interesting topic, but this is just a quickie.

Cheers!

Happy tessellating to the new kid on the block, Hidekazu!

Francine