Christmas Tessellations

For our art lesson today we discussed Tessellations and read about M.C. Escher who incorporated his animated tessellation into his woodcuts and lithographs.  This is a really cool website that shows his work and there are also some interview videos of him talking about his art.  We decided to make some tessellation drawings in our lesson today using Christmas designs.  We will be making our Christmas cards this year using this technique!  You will need:

• Christmas cookie cutters
• Tag board or card stock
• pencils, sharpies, markers, crayons, colored pencils
• scissors

First start out tracing your cookie cutter shapes onto tag board.  Then cut the templates out.  For Christmas cards, I used my paper cutter to cut different sizes of card stock (We will just draw on one side & write on the other).  This would work great for using as gift tags, too!  You could also fold a sheet of 8.5"x 11" card stock to make an opened card and then stick your family photo & message inside!  There are too many options here to list......get creative!  Here are some of our 1st practice runs......they look pretty nice!

Place the template in the left corner and trace around it.  Move your template to the right and fit it into the edge of the first tracing.  Try to not leave any gaps and continue tracing & moving until you fill the entire paper with your shape.