KaleidoPaint iPad App Help

A new version of KaleidoPaint has arrived. Here you will find:

  1. A link to the side by side comparison of the new features vs. previous
  2. Jeff’s List of upgrades for V3.0
  3. Many youtube videos about tessellations
  4. Skillshare classes on the different symmetry groups
  5. Help files on previous versions
  6. Drawing a tessellation in each symmetry group
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Hiking Season, hiker tessellations

From initial first lines to final print, with a funny twist at the end. A video, a short one, showing you the first two lines required to draw a most simple nested shape tessellation. It’s easy to draw tessellations if you have an iPad, the free KaleidoPaint App from the iTunes store and the magic sentence to get you started, one simple trick for each symmetry method.

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Rubber Ducky tessellation

The Complete Rubber Ducky Collection — 18 tessellations!

The Complete Rubber Ducky Collection: a series of tessellations, eighteen of them, covering the complete range of classic tessellation symmetry groups, plus Elvis! All of these rubber ducky tessellations, all eighteen, were crafted and refined, in the space of fourteen days, from May 24, 2021, to the sixth of June. Quite a feat for me. When creativity is in the air sprinkled with intuition, follow the flow and take advantage of it, good things can happen. Where does this topic originate you ask? I have a rubber ducky on the handlebar of my bike. It squeaks and has flashy disco lights.

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Re-Creating M.C. Escher’s Lizard #Tessellation

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.

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All Seventeen Symmetry Groups Explained

Create a Nested Shape #Tessellation in any Symmetry Group

Create your own tessellation

This list is to help you get started in creating your own nested shape tessellations. I’m not showing you how to create wallpaper patterns with lots of free space in between, but the true, à la M.C. Escher designs. A tessellation of a flat surface is the tiling of a plane using one or more fluid shapes, called tiles, with no overlaps and no gaps. Continue reading

Symmetricks / Symétrucs & Tessellations

All this talk about sharing space between characters in a tessellation has made me think of the word “symétruc”, which I coined a few years ago in a discussion with Jeff Weeks, American mathematician and KaleidoPaint app programmer. My original intention was for a word better than the French “pavages”, or “dallages”, which to me aludes to floor tiles, patio stones or asphalt pavement, rather than graphic art. Tessellation can be used in French, I’ve since found out.  Continue reading