Taught by Richard Henry, this introductory workshop is suitable for beginners, or those seeking to refresh their skills.

Patterns based upon 8-fold symmetry are found across the Islamic world and represent one of the three main families of symmetry in Islamic geometric art. This is the second of an ON-LINE series of workshops exploring 8-fold symmetry. In this workshop we will recreate the classic 8-fold rosette within an expanded composition, establish the correct proportions the rosette and understand its relationship to an underlying subgrid of Archimedian tiles. We will consider examples from Syria, Egypt, Turkey and Andalucia and there will be a brief contextual slide lecture surveying historical instances and variations, as well as common mistakes in the recreation of this pattern. Each participant will receive a PDF handout detailing the steps undertaken to re-create each pattern, so that students can re-create the design at home after the class. Although this can be taken as a stand-alone workshop, we will build upon themes introduced in ‘Exploring 8-fold Symmetry 1’, which can be downloaded from our archive. (Scroll through gallery in banner above to see images of historical 8-fold designs and former students’ work ).

REQUIRED equipment & materials

• A compass (recommended compass is the Rotring Master Bow)
• A ruler
• Cartridge paper, 3 sheets – A3 size ideally heavy weight (150gsm plus)
• Range of Pencils (6B-4H)
• Tracing paper
• Masking Tape
• Zero Eraser or equivalent
• Scissors
• Optional – Coloured pencils.
• Optional – Fine line drawing pens (useful to have, but not essential)