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Tag Archives: champagne design
Pentagonal tiling #tessellations, Part 3
Apprenticeship
Most of us learn the easy/best way. Look at the masters, follow their path and learn all that we can from them. Replicate their artwork. It is a long process, especially without any direction or assistance from a teacher. This is where I’m at right now — copying / learning from the pentagon symmetry system seekers: Reinhardt, Kershner, James, Rice, Stein, Mann, McLoud, and Von Derau. As I did for a while, copying M.C. Escher’s tessellations, decades ago, although I no longer need MCE inspiration to create a tessellation. Continue reading
Pentagonal tiling #tessellations, Part 2
My Pentagon Challenge is keeping me busy. I am plowing my way through all of the pentagonal tiling types. Quite a few of them are built within either a perfect hexagon, or one that has been distorted beyond recognition. I am finding some interesting rules of symmetry I had not yet encountered. Wrapping my noggin around new concepts. Many of these symmetry types are skew-able, not only scale-able. Also, many of the anchor point for division lines inside hexagons are variable in their location, as long as the variable is kept constant for each pentagonal unit. Continue reading
Pentagonal tiling #tessellations, Part 1
Another challenge showing up on my desk, compliments of Woodpecker Carving. Hussein posted a beautiful Islamic geometric design, displaying the use of pentagons. But wait I thought, aren’t pentagons impossible to tile using the original seventeen symmetry groups? Or so I thought. I had seen intriguing examples of pentagonal tiles over the years, but I was still obsessed with M.C. Escher type nested shapes – and will always be. Continue reading
Carlos’ Thesis Dissertation on Symmetries
I was approached by a student a few months ago — he was writing his dissertation and needed examples to illustrate the seventeen symmetry groups: Continue reading
Tessellation Art Show at the Board Game House in Nanaimo, BC
I will be showing some tessellation prints at the Board Game House in Nanaimo, for the next two months. Hanging of the artwork is October 28, 2017 – the show concludes at the end of December. Come see. Widen your perception of the fine line between art and math. Stretch your imagination with a bit of geometry, symmetry. Humor and funny characters too. Continue reading
#Tessellation prints, “Dead or Alive” art form
The size of the audience for this type of art-form is microscopically small. When you start talking about your tessellation passion, someone inevitably says, “Ah ya you do that stuff”. From decades ago, “oh ya, I remember your drawings”. Other than family and friends putting up with your gushing obsession, you’re lucky to have a handful of patrons. Math teachers, grade school kids, and a few geometry nerds don’t constitute a large client base, lol. Continue reading
Complete #tessellation workflow on the #iPadPro
It has taken a while for me to let go of the expensive Adobe Photoshop, to complete my tessellations. Quite a bit of research and testing to figure out which iPad app was the best for my purposes. Pixelmator wins on all fronts. It does what no other single app accomplishes, Continue reading
30 #OceansideBC #tessellations
These ocean-side tessellation topics are dear to my heart since we moved to the Island, a decade ago already. The weather is wonderful, winter and summer, those year-round hikes — local, beautiful, plentiful, varied. Continue reading
30 “Family Friendly” #Tessellations
I had a quick look through all of my #tessellations from the past years and came up with a list of 30 “Family-Friendly” topics. Most of these are from the animal kingdom. Safe topics for the kids. And many kids encounter the art of tessellations either through their art class or their math class in grade school. They relate to the art style quite well. Continue reading
Colour Methods for Tessellations
For the longest time, I resisted the need to add more colour, different colours, to my tessellations. I wrote before about this need, Recolouring a tessellation. Here are a few samples of my newly transformed prints. And some notes about my findings on the topic of colour in tessellations. Continue reading
Tessellation Artists around the Globe
Artists
Updated 2023-11-02:
Since M.C. Escher started popularizing “nested shape” tessellations, many artist have dabbled in the field. Some show a passing interest, yet still create with a very deep understanding of the rules of symmetry. Others can’t get enough and create constantly in this art form.
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Sketch to finished drawing in KaleidoPaint
How to skip quickly from a messy sketch to a finished drawing in KaleidoPaint
Sometimes, I find it difficult to spend hours tweaking a single outline for a tessellation. I’d rather sketch freely to come up with some ideas. This was the only way to do it, before the edit line/fill function came along in KaleidoPaint. My drawings were messy and close to impossible to change without adding more of a mess on top. Sometimes it was easier just to start over on a blank page. The trick I had found Continue reading
Refining a tessellation — a frog animation
My first ever tessellation, redrawn from scratch, to show the series of steps required to achieve a successfully nested shape.
The original image was a pencil sketch from years ago. Before Windows 3.1 and way before the iPad. And I could not afford an Amiga computer, even less the first Mac. So cardboard, pencils, scissors and lots of graph paper it was. Continue reading
Puppy Training tessellation
This symmetry group was the first one with which I completed a successful tessellation, the Frogs. Way back in 1988, in the dark ages. Symmetry group P4g. Head to head, elbow to elbow, feet to feet is how I decipher these nested shapes. A very simple technique, Continue reading