[Image of Pelican]
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Tessellation
Mermaid

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[Image of Mermaid Basic] I guess I have tessellation fever now. The discovery that it is likely that I can knock out cool tiling patterns at will is pretty exciting. Today, I wondered if I could replicate one of M.C. Escher's styles that I very much admire: patterns that repeat when given a translation, rotation AND scaling.

After studying Escher's round work with the newts (or whatever they are), I felt I had it figured out. The basic geometric pattern is a square circumscribing a square ad infinitum. I decided to do mine using a hexagon just to be different.

I got started at about 10:30 and by 12:30, I had set up the forms and had the idea already done. I had settled on a mermaid after only about 5 minutes of playing around and that idea was in the back of my mind from a scrapped attempt at one in the "Sealife" image. I spent about 3 hours "perfecting" and then about 1 hour with the simple images of the isolated shape. The really tedious part was hand coloring the main image. Since this sort of tessellation doesn't actually "tile" in a rectilinear way, I couldn't get any help in my bit map program. And in AutoCAD, I needed huge files to hold everything. I probably spent 4 or 5 hours coloring. The whole project with breaks was less than 12 hours. This image was created on October 14, 1999.

I've included a look at the master shape. This is the shape that contains all the information necessary to make this entire image. The fact that it is so simple and small is quite amazing.

[Image of Mermaid Construction]

[Image of Mermaid]

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Chris X. Edwards ~ 99.10.14
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....