This book was one I found out about via Samira Mian’s website. I love the Alhambra patterns, they feel quite contemporary. However, books by this author seem to be hard to get hold of outside of Spain but I managed to find this one.
There aren’t any step-by-step instructions in this one. Instead there’s some pictures of the designs in-situ and then pages of preprinted grids which you use to pick out the patterns. There are only brief text descriptions of how you might go about constructing the grid yourself. It is a beautiful book though and it is really interesting to see pictures of the actual tiles.
The first pattern I chose was the Gate of Wine. A pattern with no stars in it!
Picking the pattern out was pretty simple. I then put the pattern onto tracing paper, on to watercolour paper and used watercolours to colour it. I used red, the same colour as the tiles in the Alhambra…although they are slightly faded now.
I like the result…pretty modern looking.
Resources
- List of books on Samira Mian’s website – where I found out about the book
- The Con Regla y Compás YouTube channel. 7 videos of step-by-step instructions to create some patterns from the Alhambra.
Tartantastic 
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