Getting the stars down on the triangles was simple enough, but it took me a lot of wiggling to get the nine kite-shapes at the top and bottom of the design to look symmetric and not smooshed.
I'll have to see what sorts of patterns will result from right-triangles which form squares instead of hexagons.
Whats fun about this technique is that it allows one to break away from patterns that are hexagon- or square-based.
We've made some fairly creative holiday cards in the past; I think "Smokey Knew He Could Save Christmas" was my favorite. A few years ago, there was an abortive attempt to have us riding the notes in a music score for "Jingle Bells," but Mark thought it was "too gay," and we've devolved to generic portraits. Perhaps this year's card will be "Merry and Tired."
The other day I finished "wiggling tiles," as I liked to put it, and came up with a tile pattern using pentagons.
And looking more closely, this is essentially a variation of interlocking circles within a hexagonal array, which I did a variation of last November. I suppose there's only so many ways one can have repeating infinite tiles using pentagons, and it involves arranging them around hexagons.
This design suggests to me that it could work as a a meditation guide; I see several skewed perspectives in it, and the curves have a feel of water and bridges to them.
Perhaps I'll stare at it before going to bed and see if any interesting dreams appear.
All three objects were fairly low in the sky, which necessitated crossing the street with camera and tripod. After contending with some awkwardly placed power lines, I managed to frame the sky over the eaves of neighbors' houses. It would have been nice to have a tree's silhouette in the photo, but the rooflines looked like mountains or possibly pyramids.
As I was sipping my rapidly cooling tea, a fierce humming signaled the sudden arrival of a bright red hummingbird. It peered at me down its long and pointy beak, and, as I Tweeted later, I was pretty sure it was challenging me to a duel over ownership of the fountain ("Hello. I am a hummingbird. This is my fountain. Prepare to die.")
By the time my tea had defrosted the glass top of the end table, it was too cold to drink.
I spent the rest of the morning processing photos, and then it was time to go to my folks for a socially distanced celebration of my Dad's birthday. We brought gluten-free cupcakes as a alternative to a socially closer birthday cake with candles. Mark and I (okay, mostly Mark) had painted a sign for his garage, which he's converted into a combination wood shop, gym, and indoor dog play area. It looked a little like a medieval manuscript, with the H in his name outlined and a medieval dog at the bottom. I'm pretty sure he liked it, or at least appreciated it. His ginormous German Shepherd and Aoife played together; we played "Apples to Apples."
Then it was time to run home and feed the cats.
If Saturday was the Day of Producing Art, Sunday was the day of Relative Sloth.
To recap the last few weeks.
Through a series of events, the Day Jobbe has expanded to full time. It's mostly remote, and I drive in to work some days. I am doing a combination of departmental intranet design and web site management. It has been a reminder of how brutally insurance benefits are awarded (or not) to vested employees.
My extended family is doing mostly well and managing to stay healthy during the pandemic.
The cats have crossed another threshold with the dog and are more likely to spend the night in the house (rather than the garage) with the dog. The cold might have something to do with this. They also seem more tolerant of the dog in general, and no longer zip out of a room whenever she appears.
What is intriguing about hieroglyphs to me is that their use of unvoiced determinatives, which are frequently ideograms, at the end of words. Written English doesn't use them, but the closest thing I can think of that would be like them was if we wrote the word "stop" and then added a red octagon at the end. Or, I suppose, the word "poop" and then added the poop emoji (eye roll). Ideograms and determinatives give Egyptian hieroglyphs an appealing graphic design element.
One word I thought I would like to try out is "ḥekꜣ," or, to give it's English translation, "magic." It's spelled wick, ka, vulture, man pointing to his mouth. The wick is a twist of flax used in oil lamps. The ka is a soul or spirit. The vulture is a vulture. The determinative of the man pointing to his mouth ends words related to voice, eating, or the mouth.
I'm ambigious about the result. On one hand, it's cool to see the Ancient Egyptian word for "magic" glowing on a computer screen. On the other hand, there's room for improvement. The unicode characters are great for sending Tweets, IM, or e-mail messages; but they don't scale up well. The way the characters are constructed doesn't give me much room to play with stroke weight, so some hieroglyphs look chunky. Granted, this is a typeface and not graphic art, but because they're designed for an 8 or 12 point, there's no option for fine details like fingers or eyes, and so things look utilitarian and over-simplified. I'm thinking that I might improve this render if I'm able to bevel the hieroglyphs so they don't look quite so blocky. Finally, these simply might look better engraved instead of embossed.
Perhaps I can use photos of the Sarcophagus of Harkhebit for more finely crafted examples
I've been fiddling with the Three Hares icon.
The trickiest part has been choosing a color combination that doesn't make the hares' ears disappear into the pattern.
... you're working on creating heart shapes for a Valentine's Day project and the next thing you know, you've created a barn owl.
Pentagonal designs tend to fall into two categories: five or ten rays radiating from a central point, or rings of alternating units.
The third design is the second one, only zoomed out a little. Since this is all done with pentagonal symmetry, the designs end up looking like zilij or Penrose tilings. I suppose I should go back into InkScape and change the colors; red and green are traditional for the winter holidays, but a number of people have commented that the contrasting hues make them dizzy.
I thought that I would try to make a seasonal design for the Ides of Autumn. I was trying for something based on a crescent moon, but when I put in a second notch in the crescent, the result looked like something Batman would use to fight crime. Or a sigil for Klingon Pagans.
I tried a few different designs, but they all looked like something for a Sapphic Pagan Metal Band called "Vagina Dentata."
I finally ended up with some wreath shapes that don't look too lethal.
Lately, I've been wiggling shapes together to try to make interesting tessellations.
I have to say every time I make a foray into this sort of design, I have to stop an appreciate 500 year old tile artists who managed to work out these patterns without computer assisted drawing (although, they do fudge shapes away from strict geometric polygons). 
Theoretically, one could get around the difficulties of using both squares and triangles by designing a pattern with twelve-fold symmetry).
Looking at books on design, it seems the best strategy is to arrange squares and triangles and stars along radial guidelines and then wait for patterns to snap (mostly) into place.
Five-fold symmetry, as I've noted before, is very hard to tessalate unless one folds the two-dimensions of the workspace into three dimensions. My intuition tells me that folding a pattern of ten stars into a regularly repeating pattern is somehow part of the same property of our universe that means you have to fold sound somehow if you want to make seven octaves and twelve fifths a unison. 
Geometry makes me happy. 
About six weeks ago, I designed a mug using Blender. Well, okay -- the end result is a sake cup. Anyway, I wanted to make something for my and Mark's tenth anniversary. 
Then I waited. And waited. And waited. 
There were about three layers of bubble wrap. Getting smaller; the reality of how big six centemeters is began to sink in. 
