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

#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

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