the view from above

 I have travelled a lot.  I grew up the child of airline employees and cut my teeth on the tray tables of innumerable flights.  I miss the ability to travel am finding it difficult to imagine the future of air travel and exploration of new (to me) countries.  Today my daughter and I were imagining we were travelling.  We packed a suitcase, wrote our own plane tickets and announced the boarding of flights.  I impatiently looked at my watch, standing with my suitcase and a newspaper under my arm.  The only thing missing was my ritual starbucks americano. We boarded the 'plane' and sat looking out the dining room window.  I pretended to look down at a land far below me rather than the dying day lilies in the flower bed outside.  

Looking down from great heights is a pleasure unique to flying.   You see topography in another way.   This image, taken somewhere between Colorado and Calgary, was the starting point for the first edition of a new surface pattern

To begin I imported the image and lowered the transparency.  Playing with a variety of drawing tools I worked to copy the circles and half-circles in the image and did a trial rotation.  In order to get a  reliable repeat I pulled the initial line drawing to the side to redraw using 'gridsnap' with attention to angles and dimensions that would nest well together.  

From here - repeating, rotating, mirroring until it become overwhelming.

But man, that is not the right colour scheme.  One of the challenges of working digitally is the endless ease of colour alteration.  I will spare you the many renditions.  The place I settled on had some colour-picking from the original image, then altered on RGB sliders.