Monday, May 26, 2014

Creating a Tessellation

In class I was not having much luck creating a tessellation, so I decided to work on that for my weekly work this week. I went to the "Islamic Tessellations" link and chose to look at a YouTube video on "How to Make an Islamic Tessellation." I went through the video, and thought it might be easiest if I just do it on dot paper. However, it was a lot harder than I thought and I decided to switch to Geogebra shortly after, which make it a lot easier since I was using so many circles. 

I started out by making a central point with two lines perpendicular to each other, and where the lines intersected I made the center of my first circle (this is shown in my screenshot below).



I then began overlapping circles in the way shown in the video I watched. I went all way across the screen and up and down the screen.



I did this by making the center of the first circle a point on my next circle. This created the flower-like pattern in the center of the circle, which I really liked. It doesn't really show to continue to repeat the flower pattern in the video I watched, but I chose to continue you the flower pattern to kind of make it my own design. 



I then added lines that ran through the center of flower petals. these lines were at a diagonal, and were parallel to each other, and then I added another set of parallel lines that were perpendicular to the first set and also went through the center of petals. I also made a square with the polygon tool to enclose the flower inside of it.



After I titled with the smaller circles, I decided to overlay larger circles of different colors in the same pattern. I decided to have a little fun and made different color patterns as well, and it ended up looking pretty cool.


I added more circles and scrolled out a little so that I could add more lines to intersect the petals like I did before. I also messed with the colors again.


Lastly, I wanted to make polygons around my bigger flowers like I did with the smaller flowers. I also hid all the points when I finished just for looks.


I was struggling to come up with an idea for a tessellation in class, but watching the video on how to make tessellations really helped me to understand how to make the tessellations work in Geogebra. The video gave me an idea of how and where to start, and then I was able to come up with my own creation just by having a little direction. I am really happy with the way my tessellation ended up looking, and I am glad I had fun creating it, rather than getting frustrated. 


4 comments:

  1. complete: just add the link to the video you watched.
    O/w nice post that goes through your process and results in a good pattern. I liked that you shared your reasons for choices.

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  2. I added the hyperlink! You just have to click on the title of the video that is in quotes :)

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  3. Great post, Jenna! I love the creativity and detail of your tessellation. The process you described is easy to follow. I did a similar tessellation using Geogebra, but didn't get as far as adding so many layers and colors. Your post is inspiring. Thanks for sharing.

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