The next logical step for this exercise was to determine ways that these individual circles could work together to be a finished tiling. Because circles cannot sit next to one another and tile exactly, I explored various ways to make each tile fit in a cohesive manner.



	As finished works, I believed that the symmetry within each circular piece, and as a whole, was evident, and I was pleased with the various alternatives developed.
	From there, I began working on other tiles from scratch, trying not to repeat the same exact beginning steps of construction in the hopes that radically different pieces would emerge. Eventually, that was exactly what I saw:

	In many ways, this piece struck me as one of my more complex ones in terms of design and movement, though it is arguably much weaker in other areas. Here, I used color to create multiple paths that the viewer’s eye could travel along: vertical zig-zags, horizontal bars, 45 angles, along the circles by following the stars. The color also created the illusion of depth and overlap. Here, I mixed the blues and tans so that when pieces visually seemed to overlap, they shared a mid-tone of the two colors. Thus, a sense of ambiguity emerges, and the viewer may be unsure as to what element is on top of another. I believe that this piece does embody Islamic art well, as the symmetry is  rotational (something these Muslim artists did as frequently in addition to translation and reflection transformations) and the geometry is extremely based on straight lines only (with the minor exception of small circles). In general, the circles could serve as part of the design but were usually erased after the construction of the model was complete.

Then I returned back to sketches, focusing energy on how shapes can be created that tessellate naturally, strengthening the tile and making the piece seem stronger and more unified. I was very interested in the options that I developed, but the above two sketches remained simply that: I did not feel that the angular triangles and pointy polygons were as traditionally Islamic in nature. 
Thus, I began a new and final sketch. I hoped to use the ideas and skills I had previously learned to make this piece geometrically correct and visually appealing.

	I let myself make these sketches extremely complex so that as I explored various alternatives for the sketch, I could erase certain lines for one tile and keep certain lines for another. I quickly found myself with almost ten workable variations of colored tiles and narrowed my options down to my strongest, most successful executions.

	While the color palettes and structural geometric foundations are exactly the same, these shapes are clearly different. Lines that advance in one shape recede in the other. Colors that traditionally fall back into the background are forced forward in the variation on the left, or are allowed to retreat from the viewer in the one on the right. 