I made my first tessellation in 1994. I studied Escher's tessellations and found the most obvious rule: begin with a triangle with 60 degree angles. Use three symmetrical figures and try to fit the halves of these three into this triangle.
Then mirror each half and rotate them around the angle for 60 degrees. In this way you can fill any surface and the pattern repeats itself indefinitely.
You can do this exercise anywhere, all you need is a scrap of paper, draw a triangle and try to fill it with halves of symmetrical figures. And so I did, and so I do.
I'm still making tessellations, and almost all of them are based on these same triangles, but I found some interesting 'rules' to get more interesting results. Some look rather complicated, but you can always bring it back to the basic pattern to see how it was done, and how you, using these 'rules' can do the same.
Take a look at the examples and learn how it was done.
This site was last updated on june 20, 2005