M C Escher was born in The Netherlands and died in 1972. He was a famous graphic artist and created numerous symmetrical designs, among other art forms. After viewing many of his designs, we decided to make our own tesselations. Tesselations are shapes that completely fill the page with no gaps and no overlap. We wanted to make tesselating ghosts.

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Materials: Thin cardboard for the template, paper, pencil and markers.

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Draw a wavy line across the top of your cardboard, this is the ghost’s head. Cut it out and trace it along the bottom of the cardboard. This is the bottom part of the ghost.

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Now draw a hand near the top of the ghost on the side. Cut it out and tape it to the other side near the bottom. When your ghosts connect, they’ll do so on an angle. If you want them to be side by side, make sure your second hand is directly across from the first.

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Use your template to draw the tesselations.

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With a marker color in your ghosts, alternating between colored ghosts and ghosts with only an outline. You might want to make a light tick with a pencil on the ones you need to color in fully because it can get confusing after coloring for a bit.

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The end result should look like a checkerboard full of ghosts. Jaylene made hers all different colors, they’re a rainbow ghost family.  We’re interested in seeing if anyone can come up with tesselating pumpkins or witch’s hats or other holiday designs.  Be sure to let us know if you make some.