Cool Stuff The Personal Web Pages of Chris X. Edwards Tessellation Kuhli

Now that I feel pretty confident in my abilities to create nice tessellated images, I thought I'd commission myself a specific theme piece. I have wanted to create something cool for Susan and Hanspeter to say "thanks" for letting me live with them in Switzerland for a few months. Thinking of what sort of things would be appropriate, I hit upon the idea to use that classic Swiss tessellating shape, their flag. I thought that I could create some kind of image and work it into a Swiss flag using images of cows.

I think this theme is pretty good since I was on a dairy farm in Switzerland and cows were definitely part of the scenery there. The Swiss, for reasons they don't know or won't divulge to outsiders, like to put huge bells on their cows. That's what's around the neck of this one. I saw this in real life and a herd of cows with bells of varying pitches makes a nice sound as they graze. In fact, I was actually able to use photographs I took myself for models.

I did this whole thing very fast. It's 19:30 (99.10.15) now and I started at 12:30. This includes a lot of finicky coloring. It wasn't as bad as some of the other images since I sensibly used a technique in AutoCAD that would leave a wood cut look when it was done. These thicker outlines look good and are much easier to deal with. They also remind me of Escher.

The basic shape here is an irregular pentagon. Imagine a perfect square with a 45x45x90 triangle stuck to one end. That's a pentagon and that's the shape I used. It is basically exactly 1/4 of a cross. Interestingly, this pattern repeats only after a row of cows has gone through every position - up, down, left, right. This makes the smallest tiling portion kind of large. This smallest tiling portion also just happens to be just the right proportions for the official Swiss flag, which is square, not rectangular.

If you like this grey background, it's here.

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Chris X. Edwards ~ 99.10.15 Chris X Edwards solely maintains whatever feeble legal rights he has to reproduce, publish, and/or sell the matter and form of all his artistic works unless otherwise explicitly stated. ~ The previous copyright messages are copyrighted. ~ The previous copyright messages are copyrighted. ~ The previous copyright messages....