Cat's Eye Carving

Geometric Slate Carvings.

Some of you may remember the Nautilus shell I researched and carved at York Minster Stonemason’s Festival last year. I decided to revisit this geometric pattern. It will be carved in slate, a simple yet elegant design which will hopefully have a similar feeling to the ripple designs that I have previously carved.

By using the Golden Sequence of Numbers it is possible to draw a spiral that has the properties of a Sunflower head, it also how some leaves and flowers arrange their petals. This is called The Law of Phyllotaxis. 

Draw a radius line, draw a small circle up close to the centre point, draw another line 137.5 degrees from the first line and draw another circle, continue going round adding more lines and more circles-all the same size at first and you will begin to see a spiral pattern appearing. Each circle will need to be as close to the centre as possible but not touching another one. See the first drawing!

I then started developing the pattern-it would be easy to just use this pattern, but not very imaginative!!
I then drew the Equiangular or Logarithmic spiral and used this as an overlay to neaten up my initial drawing. The spiral had to be developed in stages and a certain amount of artistic license is needed!

Once I had my newly formed spiral I was able to draw something that looks a bit like a galaxy, from this pattern I drew some intersecting patterns in preparation for my new carving!!

Wish me luck this will take me about 4-6mths!