Aperiodic Textures

⇧Up to Digital Work

Examples of patterns created with textured Penrose tiles. The texture image is a piece of a photograph of an underwater coral reef.

To create the original tiles I manipulated the coral texture in Photoshop so it would match up smoothly as the tiles were assembled. Then I handed the images to a custom program I wrote in C# that “grows” a Penrose pattern. When that was done, I brought the image back into Photoshop to add the drop shadow.

Note that these tilings can be extended infinitely. I just chose a nice fragment to illustrate the pattern (I call this the “running Nixon” shape). The cool thing about aperiodic tilings like these is that even if they continue out to infinity, they will never form a single chunk that repeats over and over. Though sections of the pattern will look like other sections, as a whole the pattern will never repeat.