watermelon – Brett Leeper

Work In Progress

Below is the Inkscape svg file as of this post, which here isn’t rendered for the full repeatable pattern using the live path effects novel mirroring scheme, that would be a larger selection.
Also, working file hosted he r e for reference.

I’ve been dipping into tutorials for tiling surface pattern design, ultimately Inkscape is letting me do what I’m wanting even if the workaround is slightly awkward and even if drawing is less than perfectly elegant.

GIMP will be suitable for sketching rough designs with simpler geometries. Symmetry Painting is lovely for brush strokes but there’s no direct automation for arraying existing elements besides a basic square tiling filter. One can however use the Layer Transform offset for selections. Symmetry Painting only does offsets for the x axis, so some designs would need drawn rotated sideways first. Both only apply to one layer.

Krita would be helpful for basic square grids but has no variable offsets. Its tiling mode does extend out the entire canvas rather than just operating on layer which is nice.

I look forward to trying out Blender for tiling and tessellations in the future.

Here are some doodles I made learning along the way.

I also wrote and posted a guide for how to build this and posted it on my site here with my tutorials. In this blog post I’ll feature more photos, and also lay out some personal context and history.

Standing under the trellis looking at afternoon sun backlit dangling Armenian Cucumbers, watermelons of different varieties some hanging in macrame baskets, senescing cucumber plants, and luffa gourd in the distance among the bright green illuminated leaves

Emplaced into the natural line of drainage east of my grandmother’s home on the hilltop while she was very young, a farm pond was dug out of the clay soil and a retaining earth berm added by the Works Progress Administration in the late 1930’s. She says my great grandfather was a great advocate of the WPA, the New Deal, and FDR’s populism. The west side of the pond was nearer the house and popular for fishing bass, perch, and bullhead catfish. The far, east edge of the pond was messier to access through either the brush or the feeding watershed, so the the continued growth of the bamboo that had been planted there maybe around 2000 by my father evaded his attention until 2019 when I started working there as Grandma’s caregiver. At this point it was a massive and well watered stand, constrained only somewhat on the east end by the regular tilling of the upslope field by lease farmers and the regular glyphosate runoff that stunted its growth most at the field’s edge.

The bamboo when crowded or cut back would stunt and come up as a short grass but when sufficiently spaced it ranged in height from 12-18 feet tall. The taller, thicker canes were suitable for makeshift catfishing poles and carved flutes. The thinner canes had a nice flexibility. The flexibility waned as it aged or dried out, and it dried out much faster after cutting. Provided one acted within a few days could often use older or senescent canes that still had some green in them without too much snapping.

Tag: watermelon

Surface Design Tiling Tests 001

Work In Progress

Bamboo Arch Trellis