943: Dragon Heart Tessellation

Researching tessellations, I stumbled across a paper, written by Helena Verrill (Queens University, Kingston, Canada) that generally introduced the concept and looked at a number of common tiling patterns, but the first CP is one I had not seen before:

dragon heart

I did a small tester and loved (fluked) the collapse, and decided to scale up to a full A3 sheet, starting with a square grid. Then nested adjacent squares are layed in on diagonals to provide odd inverse hinges.

I am quite happy with this, and if more ambitious, I would fold it much smaller on a larger sheet – it would make amazing dragon skin.

This tessellation has 2 surprises: The reverse side is a lovely fish scale texture, and, when you backlight it you see luminous heart shapes – so cool.

I think I will re-fold this, some time during the term, when I am bored. I like the folding but the collapse is an “all or nothing” type that you need about 5 hands to do it easily as it curls ferociously as the paper gets used to the new orientations.

2 thoughts on “943: Dragon Heart Tessellation

  1. Hi, I love this tesselations I would love to learn how to fold it. Do you know where I can find the grid ? Thank you for your help. Pauline

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