Yeah, what gets me is, how does someone come up with that in the first place? It's a level up from Escher's patterns - the bird appears in the cat-pounced stage. Very, very clever work!
While I do not wish to detract from the cleverness of the tile, in the interest of exploring how it might be done....
* The fact that the bird appears in the "cat-pounced" stage is a nice touch, but doesn't make the tiling any more difficult. The "sitting cat" is merely an animation back-step from the "cat-pounced" image used for the tile pattern.
* A repeating tile pattern can be generated by experimentation. For a pattern like this, you basically can start with a diamond shape, and tweak one edge of it, then another, until you have a shape, and a recognizeable negative-space shape to go with it. It doesn't really matter WHAT the negative-space shape is, as long as you can recognize it as something - and once you see something shaping up, you can tweak things to get it to fit better.
We didn't know, for instance, that someone sat down and said, "I want to make an Escher pattern with birds and leaping cats alternating." If we had been told, before any work was done, that this would be the intended outcome, then it would be all the more impressive when the artist actually managed to pull it off.
As it is, the generation of something clever like this is probably mostly a matter of opportunism, and exploitation of our basic ability of picking out familiar shapes out of chaos. All you have to do is go one step further and refine that shape a bit. (And in this case, oh yeah, turn it into an animation. Obviously, there's some real work involved.)
For instance, I might look at your Lynx icon for inspiration. I could look at the outline of the cat head, and then look at the negative space around it. What could that suggest? On the silly side, perhaps the maw of some great beast that has our poor lynx head in its mouth. Or, perhaps the nook of a bird's tail, and a wing. With a bit of work, I could expand from that, and try to get toward a nicer fit. For instance, perhaps the ears are breaking up the shape I want, so I modify the "cat" part so the ears are folded against the head, or minimized enough so that they still register as "ears" on the cat shape, but don't cut as much into the "wings" of my theoretical bird shape.
I toyed around with this sort of approach a while ago when I came up with a dragon "Escher-inspired" pattern (inspired by his "flying geese" pattern) for some floor tiles. (I just finished converting the old EPS files to PDF format a couple of days ago for a fellow who stumbled across my Warhammer Quest page and requested it, which is why it's fresh to mind.)
A good point - there's drawing with a goal in mind and then there's experimenting and seeing what leaps out of the page. I came across this thread recently: Seeing art in random pixels (http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=4609.0)
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2009-02-13 02:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-13 04:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-13 05:51 pm (UTC)* The fact that the bird appears in the "cat-pounced" stage is a nice touch, but doesn't make the tiling any more difficult. The "sitting cat" is merely an animation back-step from the "cat-pounced" image used for the tile pattern.
* A repeating tile pattern can be generated by experimentation. For a pattern like this, you basically can start with a diamond shape, and tweak one edge of it, then another, until you have a shape, and a recognizeable negative-space shape to go with it. It doesn't really matter WHAT the negative-space shape is, as long as you can recognize it as something - and once you see something shaping up, you can tweak things to get it to fit better.
We didn't know, for instance, that someone sat down and said, "I want to make an Escher pattern with birds and leaping cats alternating." If we had been told, before any work was done, that this would be the intended outcome, then it would be all the more impressive when the artist actually managed to pull it off.
As it is, the generation of something clever like this is probably mostly a matter of opportunism, and exploitation of our basic ability of picking out familiar shapes out of chaos. All you have to do is go one step further and refine that shape a bit. (And in this case, oh yeah, turn it into an animation. Obviously, there's some real work involved.)
For instance, I might look at your Lynx icon for inspiration. I could look at the outline of the cat head, and then look at the negative space around it. What could that suggest? On the silly side, perhaps the maw of some great beast that has our poor lynx head in its mouth. Or, perhaps the nook of a bird's tail, and a wing. With a bit of work, I could expand from that, and try to get toward a nicer fit. For instance, perhaps the ears are breaking up the shape I want, so I modify the "cat" part so the ears are folded against the head, or minimized enough so that they still register as "ears" on the cat shape, but don't cut as much into the "wings" of my theoretical bird shape.
I toyed around with this sort of approach a while ago when I came up with a dragon "Escher-inspired" pattern (inspired by his "flying geese" pattern) for some floor tiles. (I just finished converting the old EPS files to PDF format a couple of days ago for a fellow who stumbled across my Warhammer Quest page and requested it, which is why it's fresh to mind.)
no subject
Date: 2009-02-13 06:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-13 07:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-13 07:44 pm (UTC)