Some or these contained vegetal motifs and some frame inscriptions on a ground of vegetation, but the main impression is of almost dizzying geometric pattern on every surface. With just straight lines, circles, and a basic understanding of spatial relationships between the shapes, these artists were able to create incredibly complex geometric patterns.
	Furthermore, color played a large and significant role in their work. Most revered to their art is the color green, which is seen by Muslims as the sacred hue of the religion because it symbolizes the life and prosperity that only the afterlife can bring. Like in many cultures and religious, white and black are important in that they signify purity and mourning, respectively; very often will geometric patterns and tiles incorporate the color white to cue feelings of spirituality and purity. Blue is also equally important as it symbolizes protection and prosperity and is thus often used on the artworks that adorn mosques around the world. While red is commonly seen as an important color for Islam, it is not as commonly found on the works and is more frequently associated with their flag and crest.
	With knowledge of these traits of structure and color, I thus began drafting my own patterns.

Every compositional sketch that I rendered on the computer was comprised of merely circles and straight lines. Although the program I was using, Adobe Illustrator, allows for other shapes to be easily made, I did not want to stray from the design aesthetic of the work or not challenge myself to explore the geometry and its construction most thoroughly. I thus saved each step as I went along so that I could look back upon past steps to not only understand the work in progress, but also repeat actions indefinitely, producing an infinite number of possible final products.

When I was happy with the shapes and patterns I had within my sketch, I then erased any unnecessary lines and began the task of coloring them. While I wanted to hold true to Islamic conventions, I also wanted to utilize color as a device that can completely change the appearance of a flat and outlined shape. For example, color theory dictates that warm tones (reds, oranges, yellows) appear to move forward on the plane towards the human eye, whereas cool tones (blues, greens, purples) tend to recede away from the eye into a compositional background. By playing with this knowledge, complimentary colors, and negative space (areas untouched by color), I began to color my Islamic patterns.

	I was extremely interested in exploring how a simple rotation (90 clockwise) and color palettes that varied in hue, saturation and placement could completely change one’s impression of the work. In this case, the above tiles could be two completely different tiles at first glance. After this first exercise, I also decided as an artist to leave thin white or off-white outlines in place to not only help the viewer’s eye differentiate between fields of color, but also allude to the grout that would hold such small fragments together into beautiful works of art.
