Once in a while, a design pops up in my field of view. Eyebrows rise and I immediately try to figure out how it is built. Which symmetry group? How many lines? I spotted this vase from Paula Diaz-Sylvester on Facebook. A beautiful mesh that intertwines across the surface, entirely made up of circles.
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Originally designed this Canada Geese tessellation in the 90s. No giclée prints back then, it was complex screen printing. Multiple layers of ink over many days allowing drying time in between. The original print was huge, my biggest sheet of archival paper ever. The frames that stretched the fine mesh and stencils were big and cumbersome. But that was not my biggest problem.
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Pentagonal Derivative #Tessellations: just a short fancy way of saying that I used a grid built up of pentagons to come up with these two designs. It was quite a blast and a struggle last year (it’s not yet a complete project) to re-create all of the ways that a surface (plane) can be equally divided using pentagons. Continue reading
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.
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Hard to believe that this tessellation used a pattern of pentagons as its base of origin. A pentagon type 12, built using Pgg, P2 symmetry. This is the simple outline of the mesh, and below, the coloured version, which was posted a few months ago, in pentagon blog post 3.
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M.C. Escher’s Lizards are by far the most popular of Escher’s tessellations. It can be seen gracing many multitudes of surfaces, legally or illegally. From tattoos, puzzles, belt buckles, car wraps, flooring or landscaping stones… My initial introduction to tessellations was through redrawing this lizard in its nested shape during a class on crystallography at Carleton U. That was a few decades ago, in 1988. But, as I keep on repeating (no pun), to draw a tessellation or to truly understand the structure behind it are two different things.
Sketched this Manta Rays tessellation five years ago. Love its simplicity. One single line connecting the center of an equilateral triangle, repeated in 60 degree increments to the three corners of the shape. This tessellations falls into symmetry system P3. I have many more articles about wood carving on my other blog, www.champagnedesign.com. It is a fascinating field to explore.