tiles – Nina Paley

Tricolor Tiles

Actually bicolor + outline color.

Reminds me of the sea.

OK I Lied

I found another way to make bicolor morphing tiles in Flash, that didn’t make it crash all the time. Plus it animates!

Here is the single tile it’s made from:

My Tile Obsession Will Taper Off Eventually

I can already feel it slowing down, which means I’ll have to find something useful to do soon. Meanwhile I wanted to see the morphing tiles as a 2-color map. Easier said than done: Flash crashes every time I try to convert the various symbols making up the outline into “shapes,” so I had to export a PNG and use the clunky old paint bucket in Photoshop. There’s an ugly thick outline I added to close gaps, in order to make said paint bucket work. But at least my 2-color curiosity is now satisfied.

It reminds me of the far-more-awesome M.C. Escher Metamorphosis poster I had in college. And although the thick outline and various other flaws make not-print-worthy, yesterday I made a color version that is:

I ordered a few yards of it from Spoonflower. I can’t wait – once I start quilting this stuff I might get re-obsessed for days!

More Tile Fun

With a few adjustments the tiles can morph vertically as well as horizontally. I might prefer the just-horizontal version, but I’m not sure.

In some ways I prefer the black and white to the color. When it’s just outlines your mind can interpret shapes any number of ways. When a fill color is added they get restricted a little. With additional colors they get more locked into regions.

This is such a good project to work on while I have insomnia. Or maybe it’s causing the insomnia.

Morphing Tiles

My animated tile experiments continue. Even though I’m designing in color, I had to make this animated gif small and black-and-white to fit within WordPress’s 2MB upload limit.

I am very pleased with how this is going.

Animating Islamic Tiles Turned Out To Be Easier Than I Thought

I had assumed animating Islamic tiles would be a big complicated endeavor but it only took a few hours of messing around in Flash to figure it out. I just made a half-equilateral-triangle mask and tiled it, then made a fairly simple animation underneath:

tiles_hex4_demo — Single tile from the animation above. Red indicates mask.

Obviously all kinds of variations can be made from here. If only I had tried this earlier!

The reason this is a Big Deal for me, is I didn’t know how easy it would be to tile squares with hexagons. I thought if I made a hex-based system like this I’d just get hexagons and equilateral triangles, not squares. But look – there are squares all over the place!