Twelve-pointed star
النجمة الاثنتا عشريةTwelve-pointed stars on a ground of hexagons and triangles.
How it is made
The ground
The pattern is not drawn freehand onto the page. It grows out of this tiling — truncated-hexagonal — which never appears in the finished drawing and decides everything in it.
The contact angle
At the middle of every edge sits a point. Two rays leave it into the tile, each at the same angle from that edge, and run until they meet another. That angle is the whole parameter. This family is drawn between 65° and 80°, a range settled by eye.
The numbers
- Ground
- truncated-hexagonal
- Symmetry
- Periodic
- Contact angle
- 65°–80°
- Construction
- Hankin polygons-in-contact
Sources
- Hankin, E. H. (1925). The Drawing of Geometric Patterns in Saracenic Art. Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India, No. 15. Government of India, Calcutta. ii + 25 pp., XIV plates. read it
- Kaplan, Craig S. (2005). Islamic Star Patterns from Polygons in Contact. Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2005. pp. 177–185. read it
Type any name and it picks one of these fifteen, and an angle inside that family's band. The number the letters carry is what chooses.
Make one from a name →