First time as artist in residence at the MAC, MacMillan Arts Centre, and there’s a snowstorm outside yesterday. Not one soul showed up, don’t blame them, I saw two pickup trucks in the ditch on my way back home. We are spoiled with the weather here, so we tend to forget our winter driving skills.
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Sounds line a shady drug-addicted character in a questionable part of town. But no, LOL. It’s a tessellation pattern accomplished with just one line!
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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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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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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.
There are three of them living under this ruff. They own the place. Yahoos when they are not gate guardians. Named this one Bibi, possibly for bierbelly. It is based in symmetry group P3 and the pentagons of Type 3, a hexagon split three ways. It’s a stretch from its original lines, but that is indeed where I started. Quite a simple tessellation with only a few lines. And a favourite tail twirl around a three-way rotation point – I’ve done that one quite a few times. Continue reading