Tangled By the Web of Entanglement

Hello Dreamers

Ever find yourself spending several days on a task or project, only to learn that you did it wrong and had to start over? Welcome to the Eye of Tangled Binding.

The What?

What is it? Well, in my next book it is a thing described thus:

[...] a symbol showing an eye made of silver webs lined with golened throned tendrils interwoven, interlocked, tangled unevenly around the forever seven-pointed star gaze.

So, in short, it's an eye made up of webs around a 7-pointed star. I went with 7 as in Biblical Mythos 7 represents completeness - Red letter Christians, this is why Jesus tells you to forgive your neighbour 77 times, and why God made the world in 7 days. The web is wrapped in tendrils depicting the union of two different things into one. Considering the context of the Eye of Tangled Binding representing marriage the idea of 2 becoming 1 and the one completing the other dovetail quite nicely.

Eyes represent watchfulness and awareness, and eyes appear frequently in the story. It, and the thorns on the tendrils also make the image creepy.

Now, I love merch, so I started drawing out the symbols depicted in the book. After all, these would be great to decorate the book itself and be wonderful for bookmarks and other merch forms.

Oh Dear God, What Happened?

I thought I was doing rather well with the web and tentrils part, up until it was time to assemble the eye. Then I realized my mistake and spent way too much time trying to work around it.

The problem - the web is 10-sided.

Why is this a problem? Let me explain the concept of tesselation. Tesselation, according to Wikipedia:

A tessellation or tiling is the covering of a surface, often a plane, using one or more geometric shapes, called tiles, with no overlaps and no gaps.

Now, there are shapes in geometry that tesselate around themselves perfectly. A decagon is not one of them. So I spent a lot of time with perspective tools and filters only to get really crappy-looking results.

So I had to restart from the beginning, this time with a hexagon - which tesselates perfectly.

These things happen when one creates things. Sometimes it doesn't quite work out and the quickest approach might be to start over. I've done programming before - troubleshooting becomes second nature when you want to know why your code isn't compiling.

Still, it was a week I could have spent editing Quantum Songstress or doing some video editing.

But hey, it wasn't all bad. I did make some really neat art out of it:

As a bit of good news, Whispers of the Abyss has been handed to an editor. Soon dreamers, soon.