Introduction to Tesselations

I first saw this book in my public library and after reading it knew that I would be buying it for my personal library.  However, it was out of print so I found it on eBay and purchased it.  It was written by Dale Seymour and Jill Britton and was published in 1989  by Dale Seymour Publications.  A tessellation is a geometric pattern.  M. C. Escher was the expert on them.  Not being a very scientific person, I am always coming back to this book when I am trying to create a new drawing or quilt because the basics of these designs are hard for me to remember.  The results are always exquisite though.

There is another book on tessellations by a famous quilt artist, Jinny Beyer, that is extremely technical and I have never been able to get anything out of her book.  This book, however, is visual oriented and easier for  me to understand.  The book is not only written for the layperson but also for students in the 12 to 14 year old age range.  It contains hundreds of detailed graphic illustrations from the simplest to the most intricate.  Most of the illustrations are in black and white.  A few have red included in them but it would have been helpful to have more colorful illustrations to show the reader some shading ideas.  The properties of tessellating polygons are discussed as well as Islamic art, Escher type tessellations and tessellating letters.  Graphic paper and dot pages are included in the back of the book for the reader's experimentation.  I photocopied them for personal use.

As I mentioned earlier, the mathematics of these designs go way over my head.  I mainly use the hundreds of illustrations to play with when trying to create a design pattern.  I trace them onto paper and then color in different color patterns with different color palettes to see what I can come up with.

This is a great instructional book for quilters, colored pencil artists and people who love to create zentangles.  The illustrations inside will offer hours of experimentation and play.