I'm doing a bit of self-directed study into symmetry and tessellating patterns at the moment. I know it sounds kinda masochistic, but I'm really enjoying it. I guess it's expanding on the stuff I like to do with graph paper, plus an opportunity to explore some mathematical aspects of art and design, and an excuse to play with Adobe Illustrator.

I'm working out of an excellent book called 'Designing Tessellations' by Jinny Beyer. So far I've mostly been photocopying sheets of tiles out of the book, cutting them out and sticking them into an exercise book in various ways that demonstrate different kinds of 2-D symmetry. But today I decided to apply some of what I've learned so far and build something in Illustrator. After a couple of false starts, here's the result. I like the way the gradient fill I've used on the tiles creates a kind of psuedo 3-D effect.