Hand Painted Zine, Part 7 (the sky and water wolf chase)
Last time I mentioned I've been chasing Escher's influence, particularly the tessellations that do the foreground/background shift like Sky and Water I below:
And it's hard! 😅 I didn't quite get there but here is the story of my latest attempt.
Start with a two-colorable tiling:
I started with a tessellation of kites that accepts a two-color pattern, a bit like a checkerboard.
To create the transformation I used this pattern where the long sides of the kite (a) and the short sides (b) are related, in technical terms by glide reflection. I think it's a bit easier to see it in action:
Find the animal in the shape:
Once i had this set up I spent some time trying to find a figurative shape that wasn't too complex. Escher was of course remarkably good at this. Though one thing I noticed is that a lot of these shapes really want to become either birds or fish.
With the kite, though, i found something simple enough that kind of looked like two wolves, a white one and a black one:
And I tried to keep it super simple, between the kite tile and the wolf tile the only movement is one anchor point per side. Like this:
Which makes the process of creating the morphing tessellation a bit easier, you can see the progressive transition between kites and wolves from bottom to top:
Going beyond the tessellation:
Going from the abstract wolf heads to the more figurative wolves was perhaps the most difficult part. I kept the wolves really cartoony and added some eyes (that also transform a little bit between a circle at the bottom and a scallop on top), and I also added some growing fur.
With so many wolf heads towards the top I wanted to draw a running pack of wolves but I feel I only partially accomplished the effect:
Watercolor Painting:
All of this work was done on the computer, but it's important to me to see what happens with paper and paint in the hand-made world, so transferred the design to a piece of watercolor paper with the plotter and a Pilot Frixion pen so I could perform that trick with the heat gun later.
My hope was also that the watercolor would take the drawing to a place more mine than Escher's. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's very Escher-like as I'm still processing the influence, but I have to take baby steps in that direction 👣
This is the first pass, I choose a single, very textured -"granulating" in watercolor jargon- paint called Moonglow:
Other notes and updates:
If you like tessellations like the one above I have a book to recommend, it's "Tessellations: Mathematics, Art, and Recreation" by Robert Fathauer. It was published in 2021 and it strikes a great balance between math and practicality. It's full of super helpful illustrations and templates, and a lot of the explanations are meant for non professional mathematicians which is refreshing and helpful for someone like me. In fact you could say almost this entire post was based on this page of the book:
It's perhaps a bit more expensive than other comparable books but I love it, and now you know where some of my patreon earnings go to 😄.
Although my goal is to make new stuff all the time, sometimes I cave under pressure and repeat myself. I was invited to a show of 5"x7" drawings and I made two versions of images I had worked on for the current zine, and those are available for purchase here and here
Hope the end of summer is treating you well and thank you so much for following along!
Federico