Original artwork by M. C. Escher - image source. To finish off the series of tessellation posts (see translation, reflection, and rotation for more), here's in my opinion the coolest one - glide reflections. It is, like it sounds, a combination of flipping and sliding; notice how here you could take one of the white knights, flip it, and slide it to get to a grey knight.
Step 1 - Take your square, draw your usual squiggly bit on one side and cut out.
Step 2 - Flip the piece over and attach to the opposite side.
Step 3 - Choose one of the two untouched sides, draw another squiggle and cut out.
Step 4 - Flip it over and attach to the opposite side like you did with the first piece in Step 2. Now your lovely tessellation is ready to trace!
This one is possibly the hardest of the four to trace because it involves a lot of flipping and fitting squiggly bits together, but if you chose to use paper that has different colors on each side, you can think when you traced the first shape (see the picture for Step 4), the top edge was the red edge with the triangle poking out, so when you flip the piece over, you'd align the piece so the red edge with the space for the triangle would be on the bottom.
It takes a bit of practice, but the results are quite pretty!
Further exploration -
- I happened to use squares as the base shape, but you can definitely use others too - triangles are nice, so are rhombuses.
- That said, can you start with any shape?
- These tessellations were all done with only one shape, but can you do something with two, three, four, etc. shapes?
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