Creating the SuperHex textile

I’ve been computerizing different patterns I learned in my geometry class this spring, but this design is the first original work I can put my name on. I wanted to illustrate how the complex triangles in the lowest triangle is derived from the “flower of life” in the top triangle.

In the top left, I’ve highlighted the triangles that are inscribed by circles — In the top right I’ve highlighted the triangles between the circles’ midpoints. On the lower left and right, You can see the smaller triangles are rotated 30 degrees from the larger. The bottom triangle is the intersection of both of these patterns. In the video below you can see the Inkscape operations to intersection and arrange these divisions.

The SuperHex tessellates into a visually dense wallpaper. I’m excited to see what it looks like as a fabric so I’ve uploaded it to spoonflower.com. Once I receive the sample I’ll be able to put it up fro sale, first of many designs I hope!

Drawing a Globe with Compass and Straight Edge

I always wanted to make a globe. This is the “AirOcean World Map”, a design by Buckminster Fuller and cartographer Shoji Sadao, which aims to depict earth as “one island in one ocean”, and distributes geographic distortion so no country appears to be much larger than it really is.

I decided I could make my own after I noticed a familiar shape while practicing a simple sacred geometry pattern of tessellated equilateral triangles. Once the first grid of triangles is made, 3 further cuts are made across the grid, from each point of a triangle to the opposite midpoint, dividing each triangle into sixths. That’s when I was reminded of the Dymaxion map, with a unique subdivided triangle on a one of its edges. (You can see a better version of this grid in my blog on SuperHex)

Here’s the time lapse of sketching the coastlines… I felt like a real Slartibartfast if you know what I mean.