LINKS
Jill Britton's Homepage is like Santa's sack for anyone who loves math+art. It's got one of the most complete guides to whatever tessellation software and websites exist. Professor Jill Britton is a well-know, well-respected mathematics teacher, author, and speaker.
Cordon Art - M.C. Escher's main official site
A definitive list of 50+ Escher-like tessellation artists alive & creating nowadays.
The list is maintained by Andrew Crompton.
Patrick Snel's database of tessellation patterns and the living tessellation artists who created them
David Bard - Refreshing site with tessellations used mainly pictorially. Bright and innovative.
Hop David - Various tessellating tiles. Hop has another site which has paintings based on tessellations.
Also included are animating patterns depicting the 17 symmetry groups and unusual Escher stuff, etc
Intriguing Tessellations - Marjorie Rice, discoverer of several previously unknown tessellating pentagons.
Jim McNeill's Tessellations - Fun colorful tessellations from Jim McNeill of Arizona.
NEW: Fun, colorful tessellation animations - from "Scratch", a project of M.I.T., the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, a top engineering college in the USA.
Jo Edkins - Bright tessellation site with interactive on-screen programs for making your own simple designs and mosaics.
Math-Salamanders.com has
free printable worksheets for primary school math, including tessellation worksheets here and here.
EscherMath was made by Anneke Bart and Bryan Clair, professors in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Saint Louis University. They have been teaching the Math and the Art of M.C. Escher course since its inception in 2000. Check out their website-- it's loaded with fun facts and Escher-style art.
Jos Leys - Jos is an Ultra Fractal expert but there are wonderful tessellations and other delights here too!
Ozzigami - Australian Bruce Bilney's slightly tongue-in-cheek site. Some nice tessellations, some animated too! Worth a visit. (Note: Math teachers and parents in search of stocking-stuffers, this site also includes paper polyhedra models, et cetera) Interesting fellow to talk to about what is copyrightable art and design. His designs have..."appeared" in many prominent places, without proper citation or payment.
Peter van Rooij - Interesting tessellations and approach from a different angle. Peter is still developing this site. Worth a look.
Geometric Arts, Ghee Beom Kim - Only a few tessellations but many other wonderful graphics. (Inspired 'My Gallery 6' pictures '3D' and 'more 3D')
SuperTeacherWorksheets.com gives free worksheets for students, with graphic art examples of Rotation, Translation, and Reflection (Turn, Slide, and Flip) symmetry types.
MathForum.org has a good stockpile of tutorials and school teachers' tessellation resources. Check out this page by a teacher and class in Hawaii, for example.
NGfL CYMRU GCaD is the name of the Welsh/English website with this tessellation tutorial, with downloadable free lessons and teaching materials, for teachers and students. Warning: if you're not careful with your clicking, you may drop into the Welsh version of these same pages. If the text on your screen uses ABCs but every word looks like your cat's napping on your keyboard, you're on the Welsh pages. Look for a link back to the English version, or grab a thick dictionary.
BarCodesInc
has a nice tessellation learners' resource guide. They have a text-only simple lesson plan for making the simplest
kind of boxy abstract tessellation, but I'm afraid you'll have to read between the lines a bit. The description of
the steps is a little vague and seems to miss a point-- but if you know what you're doing, you can rewrite this
lesson plan into an easy tessellation lesson for a kids' geometry or art class. (Thanks to math
teacher Lea Thompson for suggesting BarCodesInc.)
Software used to make Tessellations
TesselManiac.com - Software coming out in December 2013 / January 2014, from the same guy who wrote TesselMania many years ago.
Illuminations.nctm.org - Quoting from the website,
Need a pentagonal pyramid that's six inches tall? Or a number line that goes from 18 to 32 by 5's? Or a set of pattern blocks where all shapes have one-inch sides? You can create all those things and more with the Dynamic Paper tool. Place the images you want, then export it as a PDF activity sheet for your students or as a JPEG image[...] This applet allows you to create the following:
- Nets > two-dimensional outlines of three-dimensional shapes, including regular polyhedra, prisms, pyramids, cylinders and cones
- Graph Paper > coordinate graphs, polar coordinates, logarithmic graph paper
- Number Lines > including positive and negative coordinates
- Number Grids > hundreds boards and the like
- Tessellations > tiling patterns involving triangles, quadrilaterals, and hexagons
- Shapes > pattern blocks, attribute blocks, and color tiles
- Spinners > up to 16 sectors, with adjustable sizes
Pedagoguery Software - Tess, software for tessellation design (see Software menu)
Stephen Vincent - Tessella, software for tessellation design using Illustrator (see Software menu)
A free online tessellation creator, easy to use. This only uses polygons, from triangles, squares, and pentagons up to 12-sided polygons, so.. no Escher style tessellations, but you can tessellate the Islamic/Geometric/abstract way. Thank you, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Be sure to check out their 106 activities and hundreds of pre-K to 12th grade lesson plans.
Artlandia - SymmetryWorks, software for tessellation design using Illustrator (see Software menu)
Parcelles d'infini.free.fr/ Alain Nicolas' website promoting his new book, "Parcelles d'infini - Promenade au jardin d'Escher", a French language book for children and adults about how to make original tessellations with paper and pencil.
TOPics.org.uk - Tessellations.org sister site - dealing with computer generated graphics
The Puzzle Museum - The worlds biggest collection of mechanical and other puzzles
Surfprint - Design and order your own stationery online - UK only.
SpoonFlower.com - Design your own fabric. At SpoonFlower.com, you can buy cloth printed with your pattern. You can also offer it for sale to the public if you care to (splitting the profit with SpoonFlower). You can even enter in one of their many free weekly contests. Those free weekly contests often feature tessellation and kids' themes, but pretty much always favor and allow tessellation patterns no matter what the theme. Schoolteachers and students whose works appear in Tessellations.org's galleries, consider entering these fabric pattern contests too! Warning: they do unforgivably SPAM your email address.
LINKS TO FRIENDS
Friends, Students, and Favorite sites
PerfectTenons.com, website for an inventor/designer friend of mine who has, as the name says, made in 2013/2014 a new kind of tenon-making jig for table saws that is "easy for amateurs, perfect for professionals". I hear it's quite a lot more accurate and easy to use than the tenoning jigs of the past.
Woody Leonhard, author of 42+ "Windows...for Dummies" books, leader of the Phuket Computer Clinic (a weekly club where people learn about PCs), and owner of a restaurant & Internet cafe chain in Phuket, Thailand
Kevin Lee, long-time tessellation pro. Interestingly, he doesn't make many original tessellations himself. Onstead, he has made several landmark pieces of software so the public can create tessellations
My talented students, who have learned how to make websites of their own, complete with proper SEO and photoshopping:
