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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Some tessellations are super simple. Especially if you use the free KaleidoPaint App from professor Jeff Weeks. This one took 60 seconds!
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It’s been a very productive summer for my artwork. Garden might have suffered a bit, but the Garden Gnome tessellation told me it was all ok.
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The Complete Rubber Ducky Collection: a series of tessellations, seventeen of them, covering the complete range of classic tessellation symmetry groups. All of these rubber ducky tessellations, all seventeen, 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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Always had tan dogs. Retriever-Labrador-Samoyed mixes. Now this is new to me. One Husky-Black Lab mix and one German Shepherd. Took me a while to get used to drawing black things.
There are so many nicknames I could repeat. So many comments. It did not take me long to modify my Darwin Award Nominee tessellation from a few years ago, to reflect this new #tradewar character. Continue reading
New word in my vocabulary. Zentangles. Have no idea when this word was invented, but I seem to have been doing something similar since my teen years. Not quite like the three images below as these have a repeating pattern. Continue reading
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
This Mountain Biker #tessellation drawing was done before Windows 3.1, before the Mac, before iPads! But after the dinosaurs. 1997. It was the inspiration to do a complete periodic drawing covering the plane, rather than a line group as shown below. Sometimes these drawings take time. Tessellation ideas are a dime a dozen — completed artwork is more rare. Continue reading
Lots of reasons to celebrate!
Hey, nice fish. Do you catch and release? Bit of exageration going on in the drawing as well as in reel life. All bent over and stretched out, imitating the size of his catch, same as stretching reality. Elvis hairdoo. All in good fun. Would be cool to have a long sleeve t-shirt with a measuring tape printed from hand to outstretched hand! Continue reading
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
On the theme of ‘multiple sharing’ (as with ‘Mountain Biker’), are you familiar with the work of Raoul Raba in Zoo Mathématique? He has occasional examples. As a concept, there are not too many artists using this idea in their tessellation work. The premise of ‘economy’ is a pleasing one. Continue reading
This tessellation was done using the Pg symmetry system. Two parallel glide reflections with a few lines snaking from one to the other. In the sketch below, the thicker lines delineate the two characters, the guy and the dog. Not that many lines. The thinner lines add details to the shape. If you want to know an easy way to create this type of nested shape, have a look under the Techniques menu, and choose the symmetry group you would like to use. Continue reading
Clocks back one hour tonight. Spring forward — Fall Back. This symmetry design is built using a simple glide reflection all the way along the line. Resting dogs, using their buddy’s butt as a pillow. Continue reading
Tessellations by Francine Champagne 