Jamaica tile - 05 Mar 2025

Jamaica, I hardly knew her

Uhm. Anyway. It so happens that I was in Jamaica for my cousin’s wedding, and I was messing around with the basic geometry of ‘The Diagram’ (or the ‘Sand Reckoner’) which is formed from the diagonals of a square. Then you put a circle in the center and four circles touching that. See page 29 of ‘The Diagram (Harmonic Geometry)’ by Adam Tetlow for details of the geometry.

Jamaica tile geometry

As you can see from the design, I am just fitting in some floral motifs around the shapes. I suspect that many symmetric tile designs are created in a similar way. Just better lol.

Painted version

Then, using watercolour pencils only I coloured it in.

Jamaica tile painted

I think it looks really nice actually. Not just because it is my design, but the end result looks great. No notes. Ok maybe the center circle could be orange.