Revisions

The introduction to A Final Coloring Book of Tessellations noted that "as I stumble on additional patterns ... I can use the better discoveries to update and revise this and the previous books." In the past few weeks I have revised A Tessellating Coloring Book, More Tessellations Coloring Book, and A Final Coloring Book. New patterns (and thus deleted patterns) were six for the first book, eleven for the second, and seven for the last.

The three books contain over 300 tessellation designs and each is unique to one book. The first two of the books listed above were designed before the adult-coloring-book fad hit and were meant for children. The last book was intended for adults but it lacks the fussiness that many of the adult colorers seem to desire.

They all still have some weak designs and some geometric tilings that are in the public domain so if in the future I find additional interesting tessellating shapes, there may be more revisions.

A final coloring book of tessellations?

In the process of working on Exploring Tessellations: A Journey through Heesch Types and Beyond, I keep stumbling on new tessellations patterns. Mostly because it is fun to design books, I decided in October to collect material that I had not put into one of my past coloring books and create a new coloring book from it. I may in the future regret the choice of title, but it seemed catchy. Thus was born A Final Coloring Book of Tessellations.

The cover has a pattern that is similar to some in Delightful Designs: A Coloring Book of Magical Properties. There are two related tilings formed with a single edge, one in the upper left and in the lower right and the flipped version of this in the upper right and lower left. The seams where they meet have shapes formed with the same edge but with a different arrangement on the rhombus frame.

A Final Coloring Book of Tessellations  has similar content to A Tessellating Coloring Book and More Tessellations: A Coloring Book. There are a variety of Escher-like tilings and a few abstract, geometric tessellations.  What is different is that the size of the tilings is smaller. The two books mentioned above were done thinking that the most likely audience would be children. This book is aimed at an older audience.

The graphic on the back cover features of what I call arrowplanes. There is also a page in the book with the design.

It is rare when I have to add details to the interior to suggest what the tiling represents, but I am not sure that this shape would suggest a person to everyone.

The post Take Outs showed a crude cup that I had removed from Exploring Tessellations. A revision made it into A Final Coloring Book. Both the ladies above and the cups or chalices below fit the IH12 isohedral class with its reflective symmetry over the translated edges and with the other four edges formed with glide reflection.

Two versions of these gyrating women are included on one page. They are an example of Heesch type CGCG.

Maybe this book will be my final coloring book of tessellations and maybe not. Who knows what the future will bring?

The book has over 100 pages to color. It is printed by CreateSpace and pages are printed on both sides of the page. Some people who color may object the this format and if you are one of them, do not purchase it.

Updating A Tessellating Coloring Book

While working on Holiday Mazes, I discovered that functionality of TesselMania had gotten new life in the form of a new program, TesselManiac!. TesselMania no longer worked well with new operating systems--even with Windows XP one had to adjust the screen to 256 colors to make it work. Playing with TesselManiac! I developed several designs that I used to update The Big Book of Princess Mazes, but I had lots of material left over. Because I have not thought of another theme that would work well for a maze book, the obvious place to use some of these designs was in A Tessellating Coloring Book.

The new and improved A Tessellating Coloring Book replaced about a quarter of the original designs with new ones. I added a some bugs.

 A second one resembles a pattern of spiders, though the two middle legs are joined.

 Birds seem to keep coming up when I play with Tesselmanic.

I will do a post later that explores more bird tessellations.

A Tessellating Coloring Book can serve as a coloring book for a child or a source of ideas for tessellation projects. It is available on Amazon and CreateSpace. (Also available is a coloring book that is devoted to tessellations of the letters of the alphabet, A Tessellating Alphabet Coloring Book.)