For my wife on Valentine’s Day, I cooked up an original graphic with Celtic style knotwork in an interlocking hearts pattern. Hope you enjoy it.
I have modified images of William Morris’ public domain wallpaper designs into seamless tiling web backgrounds for a client web site under development. Just click on a thumbnail below to see the full tiling wallpaper image. These are being given away free for any purpose to whosoever readeth this blog. Use them to add zest to a web page, decorate your mobile device screen, or to liven up your WordPress theme. More than a century later these remarkable classic designs remain popular and are still used for actual wallpapers.
This effervescent efflorescence of poinsettias is the result of another Penrose pattern art tile design. This time, there are three tiles as shown below. Still only two geometric shapes, but single petals are substituted with the alternate leaf tile to add depth and balance to the overall design.
I’ve long been fascinated with the artistic possibilities unleashed by Penrose tiles. These are tiles that can tile forever without ever repeating exactly, and they produce intriguing patterns as they go. The slice shown below would be repeated an infinite number of times on an infinite plane, but at irregular intervals with different connecting stretches between them. Convoluted pentagonal trails would snake for miles through such a plane, and complex rosettes would emerge in ever larger scales. There is something of the beautiful chaos of nature in these infinitely variable patterns.
The pattern above is built out of just two tiles, shown below. Thanks to Craig Kaplan for the Java applet that generated the tile shapes.
Not the sort of thing your typical bath and tile contractor would necessarily come up with, but if you’re looking for that exquisite touch for the solarium or atrium, or a cool table top concept… Image now available as art prints in sizes from cards to 30 inches
Other artists’ works using Penrose tiles:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Roger-Penrose-Kachelstruktur.jpg
http://parrotdolphin.deviantart.com/art/Penrose-Tile-2-27686652
http://mosaik.wordpress.com/2007/04/21/penrose-patterns-physics-and-tile-polygons/
Penrose fabric art!
http://www.stitchamaze.com/gallery-guest/stephenmooney.aspx
Penrose pavement in Helsinki: http://www.flickr.com/photos/amnellanna/4130607976/
This is what the Ouroboros ring is looking like lately. Should be quite suitable to include in my scene with just a little more touch up. This is skinned and rendered with Vue.
We have this from the University of Nebraska’s Agate Lexicon:
Lemurian Agate, …a new California find, no description, no locality, Trade Name, adv., Pyramid Rock Mart, Lapidary Journal, v. 1, no. 2, p. 79. …adv. Rocks & Minerals, 1947, v. 22, no. 8, p. 746. by Pyramid Rock Mart, Barstow, California. Name also appeared in 1954 catalogue for Gem Exchange (Gem Village), Bayfield, Colorado, p. 3. Fraser and Fraser (1988) listed this material as being named for Lemur, California, a name that does not appear on U. S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Database.
The mystery deepens…
This lovely slice of multidimensional Lemurian Agate was quarried from the heart of Mount Shasta in the same quarry that produced the stone for the marvelous fluted spiral pillars in the east wing of the Great Hall of Telos. The interaction of the shimmering pillars with a cool subterranean reflecting pool of the world’s purest water set among crystal mosaics is really something to behold, though harder to get to than Mossbrae Falls.
This stylized peak is meant to blend harmoniously with my Shasta Mirage branding and logo. I drew this for a presentation about my business, and I have liked it enough to use a softened version of it as the content background image for this blog. Of course I had to modify my WordPress theme style.css file to put that background in.
I just love my new tablet mouse! I’ve been having fun creating leaf patterns for a fantasy forest scene. These images will be fed into an automatic 3D tree generator to create a setting of wonder and intrigue. Then I’ll have to come up with something suitable to populate such a bright, other worldly forest.
I’ve been wanting to revive the Celtic chalice design I created several years back, and improve its modeling detail and exportability. One issue was the knotwork border around the top of the cup. The knotwork looks good on the smaller lower decoration, but needed something more for the larger top band, so I’ve been weaving animals into the larger knotwork pattern, with the results shown above. These sorts of knotted animals are a common motif in both old and new Celtic art. The chalice design and original simpler knot are shown below:
This towering confection was a lot of fun to conjure up. Here it is rendered in Vue. Final assembly occurred in Vue, and now I will need to extract the parts and get them into a format suitable for wider reuse. It will be part of the backdrop for the scene with ravens in it, and I am working up a concept that uses it as a primary element.
The upper part of this design is very much influenced by the Brussels town hall tower, a remarkable piece of classic Gothic architecture. As usual, design ideas have been blended form different sources and improvised.
Here is the tower under construction:
Another recent model project is this minaret design for a city scene I’m working on. This time I’m sketching from traditional styles I’ve found on the web, loosely inspired by the Hassan II mosque in Casablanca, though this is intended to look like it goes with a less grandiose establishment.
I have a city scene set up with repeating building textures, and have been in the process of detailing it up by punctuating the basic patterns with interesting buildings here and there, and this tower, once complete, will add a nice touch to the image. I hope to polish this model to the point I can make it available for others to use as well.
I’m just getting started on my artist site, but what I’m really itching to do is get back to my 3D modeling efforts. I’ve got some good stuff going here, like this Ouroboros ring:
This one started as I was composing a scene with a raven flying, and wanted to put a gold ring in its mouth. I was inspired by an old story of a friend who had actually had a ring stolen by a
raven. As I was researching, I came across an Ouroboros design, and knew that’s what the ring had to be, so it’s in progress. This was a popular theme for Wagner’s Ring Cycle illustrations, such as this, one of a few sources I am sketching from:
I wanted to make my version of the ring narrower, like a ring one might actually wear on a finger. I’ll be working on adding detail to this model in progress, but first there’s this matter of getting my artist web site going, and putting finished models up for sale.
Diana Morningstar
Web Designer and Programmer
Digital Graphic Artist
© Ian D. Anderson, All rights reserved.
