I just finished painting my bedroom wall with a Penrose tiling, an interesting geometric pattern made from two rhombus shapes that can cover an infinite two-dimensional surface without ever repeating (more precisely, the tiling has reflectional and rotational symmetries, but not translational.) I love all the five-pointed stars and which come out of this pattern, which are rare in two dimensional tilings. The pattern is also fractal, in the sense that it has self-similarities repeated at different scales, from small to huge. One of my favorite fractal features loops around the pattern like a five-pointed Koch snowflake.
After several months of painting, I've finally finished tiling my bedroom wall. Instead of painting the tiling with different colors, which I think would be visually overwhelming, I decided to do it in one single color, but in two sheens: flat and semi-gloss. As the light changes in the room, and as your viewpoint shifts, different aspects of the tiling are revealed, and others fade from view. Coincidentally, our sloped ceiling is set at exactly 18 degrees from horizontal, which is one of the fundamental angles in the tiling and makes the tiling fit the wall in a particularly satisfying way.
This project was powered by Perl, Postscript and PDF, as well as a laser level, paper cutouts of the tiles, a pencil, several rolls of painter's tape, and lots of hours on a ladder with a paintbrush.
Special thanks to Spoza for putting up with the mess for several months, and to the people who let me borrow their tall ladder so I could reach the top corner.
I love the pattern! Is the paint indigo? I remember at the reunion you said indigo is now a neutral, and Sposita said she expected to come home and find a bedroom wall painted indigo.
ReplyDeleteThanks! Yes, the paint is indigo. =)
ReplyDeleteIt actually took two tries: the first time I painted the wall with something that looked indigo in the store, but on the wall it looked a lot brighter and bluer. And there's only one shade of indigo on the wall - when sunlight shines on the wall, it accentuates the pattern to the point that it seems there are two colors, even though the entire wall is painted the exact same shade of indigo. When it's darker, the pattern shimmers in and out of existence.
This is great - I always wanted to do a gradient pattern on my wall or something interesting like this or this.
ReplyDeleteBut, I'd have no clue how to do that. Or even what you did.