Building a girih pattern from the five tiles
Draw the tile set, lay it out, then draw the strapwork across it and rub the tiles out. Forty-five minutes.
Draft copy. This piece was written during the site build and is waiting on an editorial pass — the facts are checked, the prose is not final.
This assumes you can divide a circle into ten — see the previous lesson for the method, then bisect the five.
Draw the tiles
Five shapes, all with the same edge length:
- a regular decagon
- a regular pentagon
- an elongated hexagon
- a bowtie
- a rhombus with 72°/108° angles
Draw them large, on card, and cut them out. You are making a physical tile set, which is what the original craftsmen effectively had.
Mark the straps
On every tile, mark the midpoint of each edge. From each midpoint draw two lines into the tile at 54° to the edge. These are the strapwork lines. Because every tile uses the same angle and the same midpoints, straps will always meet across any join.
Lay out and trace
Arrange tiles edge to edge on a sheet. Trace the strapwork, not the tiles. Lift the tiles away.
What is left is a girih pattern — and it looks nothing like the tiles that generated it, which is the whole trick and the reason these patterns were so hard to reverse-engineer for so long.
Then
Change one tile in the middle of your layout and re-trace. The strapwork reorganises around it. That is the moment the system stops being a decoration you copy and becomes one you can use.
Keep going
Other lessons
Dividing a circle: the root of every mandala
Six, eight and twelve divisions with a compass. Half an hour, and after it the geometry families stop being mysterious.
Start here: how to hold the pen
Ten minutes on grip, speed and pressure. Everything else in this section assumes you have done this once.
Straight lines and circles without a ruler
Two drills, twenty minutes, and the reason your circles close badly.