Patterns by Rule on Step Into Dev

Heraldry by Rule

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The art pages so far have stayed on the peninsula. Islamic stars, Talavera cobalt, the Alhambra’s cut tile, Barcelona’s cement floors, Roman pavements under Seville. I am English, and I wanted the series to come home without changing the subject. The tie turns out to be seven hundred years old and made of exactly the right materials. Eleanor of Castile married Edward I in 1254 and brought her arms with her: the castle of Castile quartered with the lion of León. They are carved on her tomb in Westminster Abbey and on the crosses Edward put up wherever her coffin rested on its way to London. Two centuries later Catherine of Aragon’s badge, the pomegranate of Granada beside the Tudor rose, got carved and painted over most of early Tudor England. Heraldry is how Spain got into English stone, so a heraldry page is how England gets into this series.

Cut Tile and Poured Cement

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The two tile walls I wrote up last time are painted. A brush drifts, a wash pools, an ink line goes on top. The two new ones are not. Alicatado is cut: every piece is chipped out of a fired, glazed tile with a hammer and bedded in lime next to its neighbours, the way the dados of the Alhambra were made. Hidráulico is pressed: pigmented cement poured into a brass divider, lifted, pressed and left to cure, never fired, the way every hallway in Spain was floored between 1880 and 1960.

Tiles Painted by Rule

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Two of the art pages on this site are walls of tin-glazed tiles. Azulejería is the cobalt rosette of a Talavera dado and the strapwork of a Seville patio. Jerez is the same wall sent south: grapes and vine leaves, horses’ heads, a sherry glass sitting across every join. Neither page contains a picture. Each one grows a design from a seed, paints it the way a brush would, and repeats it until the screen is full.