Valerie Russell
Tile Project
By Brianna and Margo Rothstein
This assignment has given us an opportunity to learn about all of the work and time that goes into creating something intense and related to what we've learned. When we had to come up with a design, we made many drawings and ideas. We took a little snippet from each persons sketch to create what we did. Once that was figured out, we had to deal with finding reasonable sizes and dimensions in order for us to bring it to a real tile work experience.
When it came down to finding correct lengths and measurments for our design, it proved to be very elaborate and precise. Starting from a 4.5" perfect square, we developed 3.75" squares and 3.25", 2.5", 2.75" triangles, etc. We had to watch our angling as best we could so it correctly matched what our design intended as well as the characteristics of the shapes themselves. Since we did not have circles, curcumferences were not an issue, yet area was a challenge. We had to stay conscience of keeping track of the area of the shapes and using our materials wisely. We kept in mind the different area formulas. We knew how to break parallelograms into different shapes and add the areas together.
We learned the various centers of triangles. The circumcenter is point of concurrency of the perpendicular bisectors, the centroid is the point of concurrency of the medians of a triangle, the incenter is the point of concurrency of the angle bisectors, and the orthocenter is the point of concurrency of the altitudes of a triangle.
This project has taught us a lot about the kind of work poured into something. Working behind the scenes of something you see in museums and buildings was really tough but also very interesting and inspiring.